Don’t grow up to be a monster. If it were only that simple, she would tell him that. But if she did and it was discovered, her career would be forfeit. Worth it, she told herself fiercely. Yes, but there would be no way to know if the words would alter anything short of future-tripping, and QuestLabs would never allow a follow-up visit.
What if he didn’t grow up?
The thought came stealthily, leaving a slimy trail of disgust. She recoiled from it, a torrent of icy horror pouring through her. Dear God, what kind of mother could conjure such an idea?
She experienced, for only the second time in her life, a complete cessation of thought and feeling. The first time was when she knew, without hope, that Robert was not coming back.
When her brain began to process thoughts again, it occurred to her to wonder if she would be sitting here now, having these thoughts if Robert were alive. Her heart came back online then, and she wept until she had no tears left. Then she slept, draped across Alec’s bed.
She did not sleep well. Her mind refused to shut down, now, when she so desperately wanted it to. Trevor’s call woke her, derailing the runaway train. He asked if he should come over; she told him “no.” He repeated the things he had told her earlier in his office. She listened and tried to believe.
oOo
She was not surprised to be summoned to Magda Oslovski’s office the next morning. She was exhausted, a prisoner of guilt, dread and confusion. Some of the dread evaporated when she saw that Dr. Oslovski was not alone. Her husband, staff psychologist Vance Keller, was there as well. Both wore expressions of compassion. Tears swam in Sharon’s eyes.
Magda rose and rounded her desk to enfold Sharon in a motherly embrace. She seated the younger woman almost gently at a table by her office window and took a seat opposite her, their knees nearly touching. She reached across and took Sharon’s hands. “Trev gave us a full account of the situation,” she said. “I’m sorry, Sharon. I realize this must be hellish for you. There’s no way to prepare for something like this. The important thing now is that you not let this affect your relationship with your son.”
“How?” It was the mew of a lost kitten. “How can I not let it affect our relationship? I failed him, Magda. I will fail him.”
“No.” Vance Keller came to stand by his wife’s chair. His eyes were kind, his expression firm. “A human life is far too complex, both in nature and nurture, to assign cause to one factor—even one as critical as a mother.”
“Or the loss of a father?” Sharon asked. She couldn’t look at Vance. A surge of mixed guilt and resentment made her gaze too heavy to lift. “He knows how his father died. He knows I’m continuing in the same work. Maybe, deep down inside, he thinks that means I don’t care.”
“There’s no way to know what factors could contribute to . . . Alec’s future actions,” said Vance.
Sharon tried to smile. “I don’t suppose you could just send Alec and me back a few years. I’m sure I could talk Rob out of that last future-trip.”
Magda squeezed her hand. “Sharon, there’s no way to know what to adjust or edit in the past to change the present and future. That’s why we don’t do it. You can only edit the present.”
“What you need to understand,” Vance added, “is that there is only one thing you can do for Alec that we know will have positive effects—love him. And raise him the best way you can.”
They spoke some more, let her cry, comforted her, then let her go home to get Alec—to spend the rest of the day with him. She drove slowly to her sister’s house, trying to fathom what she had done—or would do—that her son would grown up so lacking in compassion and empathy.
As hard as it was for her to face, she could not deny that she saw the seed of that deficit already, saw it in his avoidance of his grandmother, his inability to comprehend her loneliness and alienation from the life she had known. He had never even been to see her in the place she was kept, safe from her own faltering faculties. He saw her only when she came out, and then, he was usually shy and aloof.
Vance had told her to do her best. So far she had failed to do that, afraid of stressing Alec too much in the wake of Robert’s loss. That would change.
She pulled into her sister’s car park and sat for several minutes gathering herself, afraid she’d be unable to respond to Alec. She needn’t have worried. At the sight of him, smiling at her from beneath a milk mustache, the strain of uncertainty fled. She hugged him extravagantly—a thing he seemed to relish—and drank him in, her son, the light of her life.
“Is your head okay, Mom?” he asked her when she finally released him. His concern seemed sincere.
She could only nod.
They had lunch at his favorite restaurant, a place crowded with baseball memorabilia, and which served dishes named for major league greats. She bought him a Matt Cain Mocha Freeze; they talked about the Giant’s season; they named their favorite players and tried to match them with their numbers.
They were walking back out to the car when she said, “Let’s go visit Gramma.”
He just looked at her.
“Okay?” she prodded.
“Can you take me home first? I got homework.”
“On a Friday?”
“I got behind this week—it’s make up.”
“You got behind.”
“My game last night went long.”
Oh, God, she’d forgotten he’d had a Little League game. “Oh,” she said weakly. “How’d you do?”
He shrugged as if it were of no importance. “We won . . . I pitched,” he added, damning her further.
She nearly groaned. “You can do your homework when we get home. I thought I’d invite Trev over for dinner. Would you like that?”
His face lit up. “Sure!”
“Good. Then we’ll go see Gramma, then go home so you can do your homework and I’ll call Trev—”
“Mom, please.”
“She’s lonely, Alec. She loves it when we visit her.”
“She doesn’t even know who I am. She asked if I was her neighbor’s grandson last time.”
“She’s sick, Alec. She can’t help what’s happened to her. She needs us.”
He subsided, but she recognized the mutinous set of his jaw.
It was one of Helen Glen’s better days. She remembered who Alec was. She even remembered that Robert was gone. She didn’t ask where he was. She asked about baseball and Alec thawed. He talked about baseball, school, his beloved lizard, Skinky. He thawed, warmed to her, smiled, laughed and promised to come again, soon.
Sharon felt a glow of warmth and accomplishment rise up to envelope her. For the first time since she had moved her mother-in-law here, she was not affected by the atmosphere of the place, which had always seemed to her almost a silent, ambient moan of loss and pain. It was hard to be here, but Alec had done it.
He had grown quiet again by the time they reached the car, and gazed around at his surroundings, seeming to notice the sun on the grass, the leaves glittering in the trees, the birds singing, the quiet walkways along which strolled or glided inmates with their visiting loved ones.
He was silent as they negotiated the wooded streets and headed home.
“Gramma had a really good day today, didn’t she?” Sharon asked rhetorically. “You could see she really loved visiting with us.”
“But we can’t be there every day. We can only go there sometimes, and in between, she doesn’t have anybody.”
Encouraging. He was empathizing. Feeling for his grandmother. “Well, she has friends there, honey, and her nurses and doctors.”
“That’s not the same thing. They get paid to be there. And sometimes I’ll bet her friends don’t even remember her—don’t even know she’s there.”
Sharon smiled. “Then I suppose we’ll just have to visit more often, huh?”
“Yeah.”
While she congratulated herself, he turned his face up to her, his eyes troubled. “But it’s not fair, mom. Gramma shouldn’t have
to live like that.” He blinked as if tears were threatening to come and turned his head away so she wouldn’t see them. Sunlight spattered his face, making him squint. “No one should ever have to live like that.”
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The Doctor’s Wife
“The Doctor’s Wife” was published in Analog in 1992. It poses one of the classic time travel paradoxes. I’m not going to say which one—you’ll have to find that out as you read. Suffice it to say that it is exactly this type of time travel experience that Rules Were Put In Place to Address. The story allowed me to combine my love of maritime history and ships with science fiction. The Essex was a real ship and quite as imposing and tricky as described. Her encounter with the French Piémontaise happened pretty much as I describe.
oOo
My family has always gone down to the Sea in ships. I am told that the first Dunbar shipped out of Norway on a leaky Viking longship. Probably a stowaway. First of many. For some reason, Dunbars like being stowaways. The thrill of danger, perhaps, or obsessive curiosity or arrested development.
Not that I’m denigrating my ancestors. I’m no exception. I, too, hitch unauthorized rides on tall ships. The only difference between me and the other Dunbar riff-raff is that I get paid for it. That is, I have a grant, which amounts to the same thing.
I am not, and never have been a good student. I have gotten this far in my post-doctoral by the skin of my Celtic teeth. I do produce results. I do well at peer reviews. But I have this penchant for—shall we say—becoming involved with my subject matter. Really involved.
Case in point: My most recent project. Regency England. Commerce as a Tool of Imperialism. A broad area of study. Too broad, I thought, and narrowed it down to the British East India Company. Then I narrowed it down a little further to a ship named Essex.
Now the Essex was of particular interest for a number of reasons. One is that she was reputed to have carried more sails than any ship ever rigged—sixty-three in all. She also may have seen the first use of camouflage, having one side painted differently than the other so as to confuse privateers and French sea captains. Then there was her Master, Captain Charles Dunbar—“Black Charley” Dunbar to the general public, many times great grampa Charley to me.
When I arrived in London, it was winter 2115. A crisp, chill, unutterably beautiful, travel poster day. I longed to spend time on the piers inhaling brine, but my Shift-Eye (aka Human Observer) was not in the mood to freeze his tush off while I pined for the days when ships sailed in water instead of over it and wind power was the puissance du jour. He hustled me and my Temporal Grid Enclosure (TeGrEn) quickly through check out.
QuestLabs advises Time Travelers not to carry “unnecessary baggage.” In my humble opinion, that’s as good a description of a Shift-Eye as you’re likely to find. Their function is ostensibly to assist in transporting and setting up equipment, monitor the Shift and the Traveler’s vitals, and pull him or her back in case something goes wrong. In the thirty-five years since QuestLabs began licensing the Temporal Shift Technology, so little has gone wrong that the Shift-Eye rarely does more than sit around drinking coffee and watching reruns of Dr. Who on SF-Net.
I’d shuttled my Grid to London, air freight, cleverly disguised as a shipping crate of the type used by the East India Company circa 1800. Brought it to the docks in an aero-lorry.
That was actually cheaper than making a Trans-Atlantic Retrotemporal Shift and I was trying to show a few Full Fellows that I could be frugal with QuestLab’s resources.
I Shifted at mid-day so as not to discomfit my Shift-Eye. I discomfited myself instead, arriving on the London docks (again) at midnight. It was late spring, 1805. The war with France was in full swing. Nelson was already a hero, and was closing fast on immortality. The sea lanes were a shooting gallery. It was a dangerous time to be at sea on a British East Indiaman, which, I suppose, is why I wanted to be there. Call it a death wish—I suspected my ancestor had similar cravings.
The TeGrEn’s spatial interference detector (SID) correctly determined that I could not occupy the same surface coordinates as those real crates stacked right where I’d been (or would be) three-hundred-some-odd years hence. It faded itself, myself and my Crate gently into being about a yard from the spot. There was no one around, according to SID, to see the apparition. Unless you happened to count the insensate gentleman two crates to my right.
I cautiously exited the TeGrEn and slid it up against its neighbors on silent Grav-Ex coasters. Then I went, as they say, for a little “rec’y.”
The best laid plans of Arthur Dunbar gang ne’er agley—or at least they so rarely do that it doesn’t count. The crates my TeGrEn nestled against belonged to that magnificent, towering vision just across the pier, and that vision was the Essex.
She rocked gently, bow sprit thrust over the planking like a questing arm, masts sequoia-tall, tickling the unseen stars through their blanket of thick, archetypal fog. She murmured in her sleep, too, musically; she did not snore like the sodden gentleman behind me. I listened to her croon a while—absorbing the polyrhythm of wave-lap and rope-tap, the close violin harmonies of light breezes through ratlines—then returned to my time machine. I felt kinship with a certain H.G. Wells hero as I slipped in, swung the door into place and settled down to wait.
I slept. I wasn’t supposed to sleep. That was one of the reasons for Shifting at midday Gridtime. But I had chosen the comfort of my bunk over the uprightness of my console chair and I could hear Essex’s silken cooing through the external monitor and it lulled me completely. I dreamed I was already aboard her, rocked like a baby in a warm, close cradle, the scent of tar and brine and pine pitch caressing my dozing senses.
I woke suddenly, aware of a braying sound, and was surprised to find that the rocking was no dream and that the braying was laughter. That faded, the rocking continued ceaselessly. I was aboard the Essex, I realized, and had obviously slept right through the loading of my Crate. Just as well, really. It made for less time with nothing to do but study history and make useless log entries.
I checked the external monitor. It was dark as the inside of the idiomatic hat. I assumed that the hatch was closed and that the crew, from the sound of it, was in full swing up on deck. I palmed the door release, thinking I would take a quick look around by disclite. The damn thing clicked, hummed and stayed perfectly shut. I tried again. Same result. I could see it now—banner headline: Post-graduate Student Found Mummified in Time Machine.
Muttering veiled obscenities, I pushed against the door with the flat of my hand. When that didn’t work, I panned the external monitor. Uniform blackness met my eyes. Next I ordered SID to perform a sweep of the immediate area. As I suspected, the TeGrEn and I were neatly hemmed in on all sides by immovable, solid objects. I should have foreseen that, of course, but hadn’t. It meant another Shift (my Eye would be having fits) and disarranging the Essex’s neatly packed cargo hold. Always supposing that there was even a place large enough for me to Shift to.
I put SID on it. He (you will pardon my anthropomorphizing, but when you travel alone in a crate no bigger than a small horse box, it comes naturally) came back with a barely big enough spot just below the forward hatch. I fed the data through the Plotter and in a moment’s time had skipped back several minutes, Shifted sideways about four yards and come up in SID’s targeted location.
The din of falling crates was like a convention of rock drummers, all soloing madly and cranked to eleven. Inside my safe-haven, I cringed comfortably and waited. The hold was crawling with sailors in the wink of an eye. I adjusted the external monitor and was rewarded with a striped view of a gaggle of ancient and not-so-ancient mariners swarming down the central aisle.
“Aye! Here’t be!” announced one gnarled specimen. “Holy Mother, will ye look a’ tha’! O’Hara, I thought you scum packed this tight.”
“Did, Mr. Piggott, sir.” The wiry O’Hara bounced as if he were on a spring. “Tom Farley and Matthew will attest
to that.”
“Aye? Well, it ain’t tight now, Cargo-master. Get your boys on’t now or we’ll be late t’sail. The Master’d not take kind t’tha.”
“No, the Master would not take at all kind to that.”
The voice was big and it came from directly above me. As I scrambled to orient myself to that fact, two booted legs appeared in my striated “portal” and I realized the TeGrEn was tucked in under the forward ladder. The man descending the ladder was twice the size of his voice. He effectively blocked my view of the other men.
I sucked air and held it. Black Charley.
“Who’s responsible for this mess?” he asked, his voice smooth and soft as the velvet coat that covered his broad shoulders.
Well dressed, I thought. Somehow I hadn’t expected that, though I knew that Charles Dunbar, like a good many East India shipmasters, was a fairly wealthy man. A goodly amount of the stowage in this hold might very well belong to him, personally.
“Well?” the voice roared. I could almost see the sailors cringing into their cargo.
“It were secure, Cap’n,” stated a wheeze-whine voice—Piggott’s, I thought. “Absolute, sir.”
“Well, it isn’t secure now. See to it. And whoever’s responsible . . . watch your step. Those’re my personal goods.”
He swung about then, and I got a glimpse of his face. It was long, square-jawed—chiseled, as they say—with high cheek bones and aquiline nose. Dark brows, beard and hair and pale frost-bit eyes sharpened the focus dramatically. He was my ancestor, no doubt about it.
We pulled away from the docks in about three hours time. I tried to concentrate on period history, noting what I could or could not know, say or do. But Essex was making it hard to keep my mind on that pursuit. I could feel the water gliding beneath the keel, could hear the symphony of creaks and rustles and gurgles as she made her stately way down the Thames to the Channel.
It was safer in the box. I knew that. Especially since I’d been forced to call attention to the hold. I was not supposed to be found until we cleared the mouth of the Channel. But I had—absolutely had—to see what was happening topside. I slipped out quietly—as if I could really be heard by anybody but the ship’s cat—and shined my disclite surreptitiously about. The forward hatch would not be an ideal place to peer from, so I made my way aft, seeking a ventilation shaft I recalled seeing in a decking plan.
All the Colors of Time Page 9
