Time Past

by Maxine McArthur

  “They sent them back.” He pointed at the photoimage. “Guess helping you might even things out.”

  He liked the boots. I gave them to him in thanks for the lift, and found myself in the out-town.

  Night, nowhere to stay. I didn’t even remember going to sleep against a wall somewhere, but had a rude awakening just before dawn. Someone held my shoulders and covered my face while another grabbed the medkit and scanner I’d brought with me from the paratube. They disappeared into the warren of shabby buildings before I could stagger to my feet.

  I’d thought that the moment I opened my mouth I’d be marked as an outsider, but nobody gave me more than a quick glance. Snatches of words in languages other than English drifted out of open doorways, people walked quickly along streets of small houses with red roofs. First I needed food, then shelter. Economic system should be money-based. I had no idea where to start.

  I met Grace at the Help House near the church on Roma Street. I didn’t understand that the House was a charitable organization, providing food and a few clothes for nothing to the destitute and temporarily destitute. They said they didn’t need any work done, and Grace, who was there with a box of clothes to donate, laughed at me when I turned away in disappointment. If you want to work, she said, you can clean up my shower block. I went back to the out-town with her and cleaned the communal shower in the courtyard and fixed a couple of leaks in the pipe with a temporary patch.

  “If you can fix things,” Grace said, “that’s a different story.” She fed me, then introduced me to a friend who owned a repairs workshop and said, “She’ll work for coupons and a rec-cert, won’t you?” looking at me in a meaningful way I totally failed to comprehend. “You do baby-sitting?” she asked. The word conjured up bizarre images, and while I dithered, she continued. “ ’Coz you can stay here for a while, if you don’t mind keeping an eye on my ten-year-old when I’m on night shift. I don’t want no business done here,” she added hastily. “It’s not that I’m fussy, but you get some weird punters these days, and the kid”... I said I’d be very grateful to stay, having deciphered the “sitting” part, and only a little while later worked out what she meant about “punters.” The option didn’t appeal to me and I was glad I’d met Grace before being driven to consider it.

  For the first few weeks I was too busy coping with attacks by local viruses on my unprepared immune system. At first I thought my twenty-second-century medical regulators had been disabled in some way by the jump to the past. Then I realized that they were probably still working, which was the only reason I was still alive.

  When I finally experienced a few hours without feeling sick, I wanted information about the town, about the world, about my ancestors, and I needed to work out a way to contact the Invidi when they arrived. To do this I needed access to a computer, those ugly, primitive boxes that had to be physically connected to a source of electricity most of the time. Primitive maybe, but they were expensive by the standards of the out-town, and Grace certainly didn’t have one in her tent.

  The local store ran noninteractive broadcast programs, what older people called TV and younger ones called vidnet. It was the only place within a couple of streets that had a screen. Or I could access the local library’s network, which connected only to other public libraries; or I could use the Net Café over the other side of Parramatta Road, but I’d have to borrow someone’s account as you needed an NID to set up a new account. At the café I could surf the older internet, but most of the information I needed, for example about military communications satellites and higher level scientific information, was on Safenet, which was another system entirely and which had far stricter controls. So I tried to study ways to access different systems without authority—“hacking.”

  About a month after I arrived I found another temporary job with a mechanic. I picked up the essentials of the work quickly, but it was an hour’s walk each way and there was no infonet access at the workshop.

  One day, about a month and a half after finding that job, I was walking back to the tent by a different route and saw the words “EarthSouth Movement” on a poster outside an old house. I went inside to see what it was, and found myself in the Assembly office. A tiny, neat woman with a stern voice asked me if I’d come about the job. I said yes. She said Abdul’s just stepped out, you can talk to me until he gets back.

  She introduced herself as Florence Woo and asked me why I wanted the job. I said, having seen the posters and the slogans, that I’d been involved with the EarthSouth movement in South America. And that I needed a job closer to the out-town. We don’t pay much, said Florence, naming a figure about half of the tiny amount I received from the mechanic. By now I knew that illegal immigrants couldn’t hope to be paid fair wages for any job. But I saw the computer on the desk and calculated that the drop in pay would be tolerable if I didn’t have to spend most of it at the café. And I could keep giving rent to Grace.

  Florence said she’d “discuss” my application with Abdul. When I went back the next day, she said I’d got the job. Which was, I found out, a combination of mechanic, electrician, and computer repairperson.

  None of which would come in handy when I got back and found myself ex-head of station, which would happen if Earth was annoyed at the way I’d borrowed funds to complete the Calypso II project, then thoughtlessly become lost in the past. If the jump point maintained its correspondence of ninety-nine years between 2023 and my own time of 2122.

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed, being careful to first whack the ground with the short stick I kept handy for that purpose. Rats usually stayed around the outside garbage heaps where food was freely available, but I’d put my bare foot on a large cockroach once and the memory still made me shudder.

  The dirt felt cool and gritty under my toes as I felt around for my sandals. Bluish white light snuck through cracks in one side, from the floodlights across the little river, where a clinical waste incinerator ran twenty-four hours, seven days a week. On the door side of the tent, yellow light would grow brighter, then fade again as somebody carried a lantern or torch along the track.

  I reached for the jug and poured a glass of water. Sometimes it calmed the wheezing from the asthma attack. The water tasted stale and sour, although it was bought, filtered stuff. Even Jocasta’s recycled water tasted better than this.

  I finished sipping and leaned forward with my head resting on my folded arms on the crate table. A change of posture sometimes helped with the wheezing, too.

  During the day I could think about telescopes and contacting the Invidi, and all the minutiae of daily life. I’d never imagined all the small, dreary tasks that had to be done to function at even this century’s standard. All these things, out to get me. Like the viruses, lining up to get past my immune system. I wasn’t used to taking care of anything but my job. On Jocasta, food preparation, cleaning, and waste disposal was done for us, silently and mostly efficiently.

  But now, in the hours of darkness and silence here on Earth—unlike on the space station, where we have night-shift workers, and aliens who work their day shift at night, and the whole complex machinery of life support and recycling hums on in the background—in the hours when everything shuts down except the incinerator, my memories of the past creep up on me. My past, but this world’s future.

  I can see the chain of events that led to my being stuck here in the past quite clearly. A line of dominoes, set up in some pattern only the Invidi can understand. Every night in the out-town I sit wheezing in the dark and line them all up in my mind. Every night I give one of them a push, and watch as the line falls.

  First—although, depending on which domino I push, it might not be first—there was the Abelar Treaty. Named after the star system within which Jocasta is situated, the Abelar Treaty was designed by me and my advisers on Jo-casta and was signed by two alien races and myself, as governor of the Abelar system and therefore representative of the Confederacy. This was in early 2121. The treaty made the two
alien races, the Seouras and the Danadan, co-monitors of each other’s affairs within the Abelar system, which hopefully would stop their fighting with each other and destroying the neighborhood.

  The Abelar Treaty was significant because when a different group of Seouras arrived several months later, we thought they also recognized the treaty. But these Seouras were different. Domino number two. Their heavily armed gray ships attacked the station and blockaded us from any contact with the Confederacy. The Seouras wouldn’t say what they wanted, they just kept us prisoner in Jocasta.

  For nearly six months we tried to find ways to circumvent the blockade or communicate with the Confederacy, and to keep the station’s residents safe and fed. Six months of hell. Then domino number three arrived—a ship called Calypso appeared suddenly and activated a jump mine, which killed all but three of the crew. This was in January 2122. Calypso ’s presence was a mystery at first. It couldn’t have traveled from Earth to Jocasta in flatspace within fifty years, which was how long the cryogenic sleep system was set to preserve the crew. On the other hand, human ships were not equipped with jump drives, nor was there a recorded jump point in the place where Calypso appeared. It couldn’t have jumped from Earth to Jocasta, because no jump points existed off the Central network. So we thought.

  The Calypso crew’s plan was to head for Alpha Centauri from Earth, and after fifty years of frozen sleep, to decelerate and look for habitable planets in that system. A mad idea, and if they’d arrived on schedule in 2076, they would have found a small but thriving Melot station there. But instead they arrived near Jocasta. And we couldn’t tell how long they had been asleep.

  Calypso ’s arrival signaled the end of the Seouras blockade. When we talked to the crew, they told us that an Invidi called An Serat helped them to leave Earth. We suspected then that Calypso might have jumped from a point somewhere along its course to Jocasta. I thought of An Serat’s help as being domino number four, although a little out of time.

  It certainly set things off on Jocasta. I wanted to take a look at Calypso ’s engines, because I thought the Nine should be able to have jump technology. Our resident Invidi, An Barik, wanted Calypso ’s engines so the Nine would not have a chance at learning about them. A terrorist group who’d infiltrated the station also wanted the engines so they could use the jump drive to help them fight the Confederacy. And, finally, it turned out that the Seouras ships we had been resisting for six months were in fact ships of a different alien race called the Tor, who had taken the Seouras prisoner and forced them to communicate with the station for the purpose of... getting hold of Calypso.

  I tended to lose track of my dominoes at this point. Sometimes I put in extra ones for the gray Tor ships and the imprisoned Seouras. The Tor ships contained no live Tor, an aggressive alien species who’d fought a war with the Invidi for nearly a century. But after the Tor withdrew suddenly from Invidi space less than a decade ago, Earth time, we’d seen no sign of them. We never found out if the Tor ships had been traveling for millennia in flatspace, or if they appeared from their own jump point.

  At any rate, the closest gray ship found out about Calypso and tried to take it. Murdoch and I stopped them by damaging the gray ship using a bomb he planted inside Calypso. The gray ship was damaged and retreated, leaving a field of debris behind.

  Some of the debris contained pieces of Calypso ’s engines. I salvaged those engines and started the Calypso II project.

  In June 2122, I left Jocasta on a test flight and ended up in 2023. Which should be impossible. Dammit, where did I go wrong?

  Someone knocked. Or rather, pulled the piece of string at the entry that rattled the pieces of pipe I’d hung in the center of the roof. A gentle clackety-click that roused me from my thoughts.

  At first I thought it was the wind, grown strong enough to rattle the whole tent. But then it sounded again.

  It had to be someone from the neighborhood. One of the gang that collected Grace’s “rent” would have simply pushed open the door and demanded payment. Maybe something had happened to the Assembly office.

  An uneasy lump in my throat, I wrapped a sarong around my waist and stood near the door.

  “Who is it?” I called softly.

  “Halley, is that you?” a man’s voice called back.

  In this century nobody knows my name is Halley. Nobody speaks a language called Earth Standard because it hasn’t evolved yet.

  No, it’s not possible. Must be an hallucination. That flu’s caught up with me.

  “Hello?” I said cautiously. Then thought how ridiculous it was, standing there talking through a screen that provided no protection anyway. I opened it, hand shaking.

  “It’s me...” said the man on the other side. In the dark his face was indistinct, but his voice and his smell and his rhythm of breathing was Bill Murdoch’s and I was backing up until my legs hit the bed.

  He stepped into the room. “Halley, is it you?”

  Then he lifted something up close to his eyes. Something small with two arrays of blinking lights in patterns. I recognized it as a directional indicator.

  The sight of that small piece of twenty-second-century technology anchored my wits. I reached up the pole in the center of the tent and switched on the bulb.

  In its weak yellow light Murdoch looked at me and breathed a sigh of relief. “It is you. For a second, I thought I’d got the wrong place.”

  He wore an old T-shirt and sarong, with thongs on his feet like any resident of the out-town. For a moment I saw him as a dark, heavy-chested stranger with lines on his face that could be either from worry or laughter. Then he was just himself.

  He grinned. “Hey, don’t go all wobbly on me.”

  I shook my head, beyond speech. An immense bubble of loneliness popped inside me.

  “I’m really here.” To demonstrate the point, he stepped forward and hugged me.

  I let my face be squished against a warm, firm chest damp with sweat. Reached around with my arms and felt his solidity. Gods, he really is here, and I’m shaking and my face is wet. Am I laughing or crying?

  “Bill, how did you get here?” I said, muffled. Stupid question—the same way I did, obviously.

  His arms tightened for a moment, then relaxed. We separated awkwardly. Uncertain what to do, I reached for the water bottle and poured him a glassful.

  “It’s filtered,” I said, unable to tell in the dim light whether his expression was distaste or anxiety. He gulped it down and drank another. Put the glass on the crate and looked around the small space. “Is this it?”

  “Is this what?”

  “Where you’ve spent the past five months?”

  Five months. The same length of time as I experienced. So he must have come through the same jump point that I used, and it had stayed stable at the same “distance” of about ninety-nine years—I left Jocasta in September 2122 and arrived here in December 2022. It was now April 2023.

  “Halley? Is this where you live?” He was frowning in puzzlement, the expression familiar in the way it drew his brows together, making two deep lines between them.

  “Yes. Yes, it is. When did you get here?”

  “Just arrived,” he said. “Yesterday.”

  Murdoch must have left in January 2123.

  I ran my hand over my head, too many words competing to get out at the same time. I wanted to ask him how he got a ship to travel through the point, how he reached the surface undetected, what was happening back on the station, why he’d come alone, how he’d found me—although I had a good idea—and if he had a way to get back. I took a breath to say the words, but it wouldn’t come into my lungs. Damn, damn. Furious and embarrassed at the same time, I dropped to my knees and scrabbled for the inhaler beside the bed. Where is the thing? I had it earlier...

  Murdoch was kneeling down beside me looking worried, but I couldn’t tell him what was wrong and didn’t care because until I found the blasted inhaler... not under the bed…oh hell where…blanket, in…the…got it.


  “M’sorry,” I said as soon as I could speak, sitting on the floor. “Respiratory problem. Air passages close up.” The hard edge of the bed board dug a trench across my spine and the packed earth was cool on my backside. One of Murdoch’s hands rested on my knee, the other held my shoulder. He was shaking. I was shaking, with the teary relief that followed an attack.

  “Are you all right?” he said helplessly. “Does this... how long has this been...” He peered closer at my face. “Jeezus, you look awful.”

  “Thanks.” I wheezed the word with as much sarcasm as possible. He was so close. I could sense every centimeter of his body in a way I didn’t remember having experienced before.

  He didn’t seem to notice anything, and leaned back against the bed beside me. “Don’t be touchy. If you were on the station I’d hospitalize you on the spot.” He waved his hand at the tent. “What is this place? I got halfway in here and thought I must have made a mistake.”

  My skin prickled where his arm and shoulder rested against mine. “It’s where unofficial refugees, illegal immigrants, and asylum seekers end up. Also anyone else who wants to stay away from the legal system.”

  He grunted. “Lawbreakers, in other words.”

  “And drug users. Runaways. Homeless.”

  “Okay. I know what Earth was like in this decade, I read the history files.”

  “You’ll find the details quite different.” I felt clarity return. “First things first. Is your ship intact?’

  He shook his head. “Sorry. Guess you want to get out of here.” His voice was gentle.

  Don’t get nice on me, Bill, I’ll break down. “Second, tell me how you got here.”

  Murdoch grabbed the hard plastic chair and straddled it in another familiar pose.

  I sat cross-legged on the bed to listen.

  Five

  “An Serat sent me,” said Murdoch. At my stare, “Make sense to you?”