by John Barnes
“Why, right, sir, in what you’ve always argued before me and my daughter, at many an evening of whist.”
Oh, hell, I have no idea how to play whist, was my first thought, but then he went on:
“The natural arrangement of mankind is masters and their servants, and this country should have been settled by a few wealthy men and their trusted overseers, plus all the niggers we needed from Africa. It was allowing free white paupers into this country that has made all the trouble, for you can’t shoot ’em when they’re wrong, you’re at the expense of a trial every time one needs hanging, and most of all the filthy bastards will go thinking themselves your equals. That’s what you’ve said and by god the events of the last year have convinced me.”
I was spared from hearing any more of my opinions—just who the hell was I in this timeline, anyway?—by a rattle of gunfire from the upper floors. There were wild yells up there, so either they’d hit something or they thought they had.
“Just the same,” I said, “if you’ll hold them briefly, I’ll be over your garden wall again, dash around, get the crowd’s attention, and get them away from your valuable property. I can get away quite safely, I assure you; it’ll only take a little nerve and luck.”
“Oh, godspeed, sir,” Honoria said, and extended her hand to be kissed. As an art historian, I knew she was premature—the Romantic Era wasn’t due to start for another half generation—but still, if you grew up on movies, how could you resist a moment like that? I kissed her hand, smiled at her, and said, “All right, then, over the wall and I shall see you sometime later.”
It was just a quick dash back to the brick wall, and it was a lot easier to make the jump from this side, since there was a bench in the right place. I bounded over, dropped into an empty street—the whole mob must have been around the front—and raced around the block, yanking the NIF from my boot.
There’s a setting on there for “temporary hallucinatory panic,” a fancy way of saying the dart gives you six hours of nightmares in broad daylight. I figured in an age like this one, when every kind of raving lunatic was let loose to wander in the streets, it might pass unnoticed, with a little luck.
They actually weren’t much of a mob, and I saw why Honoria and the judge hadn’t been very frightened. When I rounded the corner and crouched behind a wooden horse trough, I saw that there were really only about seventy of them, and almost all of them were hanging back and shouting, trying to egg on the few who were considering throwing rocks. Not one even had a firearm in hand.
None of them were on the ground, so I figured that the volley of fire from the house had frightened them but not hit them; the translator in my head explained quickly that though the Minié ball had made firearms more accurate in this timeline, and with cartridges they loaded faster, they were still no great shakes as weapons, and a few of them going off was frightening but not a reason to turn and run. Better machining, and thus more efficient human slaughter, wasn’t due to be introduced for another generation in the master plan—they wanted to get a couple of wars over with first, apparently.
At least it was nice to know that the shot that went by my head had probably been aimed at it. I’d been thinking that if it was a warning shot, perhaps shooting at and hitting all four of them had been an overreaction.
I set the NIF for temporary hallucinatory panic and squeezed ten shots into the mob.
There was an instant change; a few fell to the ground and others began to shout. When you give someone hallucinations, he sees things that are part of his culture, things his culture thinks about a lot. A man who knows nothing of elephants doesn’t hallucinate pink elephants no matter what he drinks; a Muslim doesn’t see Jesus.
These people were definitely not Muslims.
I should have figured that in a Puritan city—especially since in most places the poor are more religious than the rich—what I’d touch off was a whole series of religious revelations. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. One old codger with a lot of stains on his trousers, and a pale thin young girl with a big basket of buns, began to talk loudly to Jesus, who seemed to be very angry with both of them, to judge from just the side of the conversation I could see. A younger man, who looked like he’d been spending time at the tavern drinking on someone else’s tab before he joined the crowd, thought that Catholics were sending devils to torture him. A plump, dowdy woman began to scream that Quakers and Anabaptists were coming out of the sky to roast and eat her children.
Moreover, they all sort of fed ideas back to each other, so that in short order they were all having the same vision, and then a bunch of people who hadn’t been hit got the idea, too. There’s a certain prestige, in certain circles, about having been god-attacked, and, besides, some people are naturally prone to it, so that although I’d only fired ten fléchettes, it was only half a minute before there were twenty people having visions.
The idea was screamed by a red-haired freckled boy, everyone else took it up, and then they were all running down to the harbor to try to walk to Charles Town, across the water (and not via the bridge) for some reason or other. I stood and watched them go; none of the crowd seemed to remember me.
They had gotten almost out of sight when I heard the gunshots. I ran to see what was going on, and there in the street was—
Me.
He wasn’t dressed exactly like I was, or like I would have been if I still had my trunk, and his wig had fallen to the side, but he looked like me, he had several braces of pistols slung over his shoulders like an overgarlanded Christmas tree, and he was busily emptying the first brace into the crowd. As I watched helplessly, the young boy who had started them in motion toward the Charles, a kid of not more than ten, fell over, clutching his abdomen.
The “Mark Strang” in front of me pulled another pistol from the brace, cocked and pointed it. He squeezed the trigger, and with a boom an old man fell dead to the sidewalk.
Everywhere people were scrambling for cover. The man who looked just like me pulled out another brace of pistols and began to fire again—first a shot into the now-fleeing crowd that caught a handsome young man in the back and flung him face first into the mud, then a wanton shot between the shutters where a young woman was peeping out at the action on the street. I couldn’t tell from the shriek whether she had been hit and hurt, or perhaps she had only been terrified.
He raised the last pistol in the brace, this time leveling it on—
A little kid, I realized, too dirty and small for me to say boy or girl, dressed only in a smock, running frantically away from him.
Instinct took over. The NIF in my hand shrieked before I was even aware that I was holding it or pulling the trigger. I had not even taken the time to reset the fléchettes, so the one that went into him was still set for temporary hallucinatory panic—not something you want to do to a man who is holding a loaded gun.
Abruptly, the loaded pistol still in his hand, the other “Mark Strang” began to scream and gibber, moaning with fear. He fired wildly at something that wasn’t there, then turned and fled, leaving four bodies stretched in the street.
I didn’t think it would be smart to hang around and try to explain things, especially since I did not understand any of them myself. I darted into an alley, ran down it at full tilt, and veered to the side. I could hear wailing and keening beginning back behind me, which was probably the friends of my doppelganger’s victims coming out of shock. I zigged and zagged between alleys, got myself completely lost, and made a point of staying off main streets.
At least it was only April, and the sun would go down early. For three more hours I moved quickly from hiding place to hiding place; twice I heard parties of people looking for me, but too far away for me to make out exactly where they were or anything they were saying except that it sounded like if I surrendered right now, I at least wouldn’t be lynched.
I was crouching between three barrels—one rain barrel and two filled with kitchen slops and chamber-pot dumpings—when a s
mall party of men with pistols and clubs came down that alley. By now the sun was nearly down, and I had begun to think I might stay there till it was full dark and then see what I could come up with. I was tired, footsore, more scared than I wanted to admit, and completely baffled, and for a guy who was supposed to have such a promising start, somebody the Closers would go out of their way to eliminate, I sure didn’t feel like I was having much effect, at least not in any direction that I was supposed to. If I was a big threat to the opposition, you couldn’t tell it from where I was squatting.
I sat all the way down and set the NIF to stun; I didn’t want to murder anyone innocent, and I figured these guys were probably just a local posse.
It took me a moment to notice that the spot on which I had seated myself was foul with wet street muck and the stuff that leaked from the bottom of the waste barrels, and cold besides, and it was soaking into the seat of my pants. I gritted my teeth so as not to shiver.
“Ah, Nathan, he ain’t going to turn up. He’s a madman they say. He’ll have shot hisself somewheres, or run into the bay, or they’ll find him moaning and weeping somewheres.”
“It’s not our job to know where he is,” a reedy, nasal voice responded, “but to look for him. And we need to look for him here.”
“Well, he ain’t here. And it’s nigh on to dark, and the wife will be stone angry with me, she will, and there ain’t no point in us being here in this empty way. You know he’s got to be a madman—a Royal Customs Commissioner, to do a thing like that? First to stand about in the street when the damned Sons of Liberty are about, then to shoot—and not once, but twice, and the second time not the Sons but just a crowd—”
“Ah, the crowd was whipped up by the Sons,” one of the men said, “and I told my son if he ever joins a mob like that, I’ll by god have his guts nailed to the fence post.”
“I’d watch how you talk of the Sons of Liberty,” an older voice said. “They’ve got ears, you know—”
“And you’re one of them ears, is that it, old man? They’re thieves and ruffians, the type that ought to have an ear cut off so decent folks knows ’em by sight, and if you’re their ear, then that ear ought to be cut off—”
There were two sharp thuds and groans, which I figured was a pistol butt being used hard on each of the arguers. “Next time I’ll put a pistol ball in each of you and claim you by-god fought a duel,” the sharp-edged voice I had identified as Nathan said. “We ain’t here to talk about customs, nor taxes, nor the Sons of Liberty. We ain’t here to talk at all, and a good thing too, because if we was drawing our pay for that, the whole colony couldn’t afford you two jibber-jawers. Now what we’re here for, in case you forgot, is to find a man that shot down citizens in the street. Self-defense or madman or whatever, that’s for the law to decide. We’re just to take him, alive if we can, and bring him in. If we find him. Which we ain’t going to do by standing here and jawing.”
“We ain’t going to find him at all,” one of the voices said, sullenly, and with the kind of tone that comes through a bruised mouth.
“We don’t know that till we look, I said. And I’m the captain here.”
There was a lot of grumbling, but they went off, following Nathan.
I stood up slowly; if the patrol was going west, I might as well go east.
Mark Strang, Royal Customs Commissioner? The last we’d heard from Rey Luc, there wasn’t even supposed to be any Customs—the Empire had declared free trade, which is what you’re in favor of if you’re in a position of strength. It was supposed to be France, Holland, and Spain that were doing the smuggling and passing the restrictive acts in this timeline. Clearly in four years a lot could go very far wrong indeed.
I checked my transponder tracker again, but there was nothing to indicate that there was any transponder (other than mine) on Earth. Wherever Luc might be, he was at least a couple of miles away, or under or behind something that really blocked radio.
Half an hour later I found a dry, dark corner under a flight of steps behind a dry goods store, and curled up to go to sleep. Things were just plain not going well, I said to myself.
I ran over the inventory of conditions when you were supposed to call for backup. When you arrived and discovered a sizable Closer armed force. When you arrived in the wrong timeline, indicating that chronflux had carried away or destroyed the timeline we were aiming for. When you were badly hurt or in imminent danger of death, and “such condition might tend to jeopardize your mission.” Nothing in any of those about being cold, dirty, tired, hungry, hunted by posses, beset by doppelgangers, or just having had the most confusing day of your life. I decided I was probably going to have to tough this one out.
You know how so often things look better in the morning? When they don’t, it’s because they’re really bad and not getting better. I woke up to the crashing thunder of cart wheels in the street, right at dawn, and noticed that I was even colder, that the feel of whatever had soaked my clothes in places was indescribably slimy, and that I was a lot hungrier and coming down with a cold.
I coughed hard, spat out some phlegm, said some words that were the same in both centuries, and groped in my pocket for the first-aid kit. I jammed a self-injecting ampoule against my arm and gave myself one of my three immune boosters; for the next few days I’d have an accelerated immune response, which meant I might be sick as a dog this afternoon, and would need to eat like an ox to get energy back, but I’d be fine by tomorrow morning. For that matter, temporarily just about nothing could infect me or cause me to get cancer; if I wanted to take up smoking or whoring, and had money for either tobacco or a woman, this was the time to do it, as the humor ran in the training center.
God, I missed everyone, and I really wished I had a letter from Chrysamen. To read over the coffee and breakfast I wasn’t going to get, after the shower I wasn’t going to get either.
It was probably about forty degrees out. I’ve slept rougher than under those steps, but not much rougher.
I drew a deep breath and coughed it out. All right, Strang, I said to myself. Now that we’ve got self-pity down cold, we work for some other possible responses, like maybe some effective ones. Let’s get going on something. First job is stop looking like this, get some clean clothes, and find Rey Luc. After that, fix whatever turns out to be wrong. Merely a big problem, not an impossible one.
The pep talk did me about as much good as a pep talk ever does. I felt better for having given it but not much for having gotten it. I shook off my clothes, decided I looked like a bum, decided I could do nothing about that yet, and slouched down the alley, pulling my tricorne down low to hide my face a little.
The trouble with alleys is that sooner or later they lead to major streets. I had known that I was moving toward the Common the night before, but hadn’t realized how close I was; in just a few minutes I had popped out onto Common Street, with the wide green space to the west of me. I crossed over into the Common itself, where a group of boys and dogs were just driving the sheep in to graze, and headed for the Charles. Walking along the river might give me a chance to cover some ground inconspicuously and pick up some clues about what was actually going on. And at this early hour, other than the sheep and the boys, there was nothing and no one here.
I let myself pass close enough to two boys to hear what they were saying; they were talking about whether or not “Seth’s sister” was too ugly for any man to marry. Why is it in the movies you get all the information by overhearing two minor extras, and out in the timelines you have to get it a little bit at a time. The major thing I learned was that “Seth’s sister” had a nice chest and bad acne; I supposed it might be useful information in the event of being offered a blind date sometime.
Another couple of boys were talking about three public hangings coming up; none of them seemed to be mine.
The Common was a beautiful place, and without any real traffic noise, I found myself thinking that one of these days—once things were a bit more in hand—I’d
have to come here at this time just for pleasure. Spring was far enough along for the grass to be bright green and a thin haze of leaf buds to be on the trees, and though damp and squishy in places, the ground wasn’t really muddy anywhere except right where the sheep had been concentrated.
Eventually I hit Charles Street, which at the time was nothing more than a mud track. Nobody seemed to be walking on it this morning—it didn’t serve much purpose just yet other than as a bypass for carts and wagons from Cambridge to the South Boston Bridge—and took that west to the river.
Now that I was up and moving I was warmer, and though I had no plan as yet, I had at least determined that I was going to get one. The sun was coming up fast now, and the air had that glow it gets in early spring, when it still holds the damp and cold of winter but the sun is warming it fast.
It occurred to me that, as they tell you in training and as anyone in my line learns, disguise is mostly a matter of not looking like yourself, and that can mean very simple things. I let myself slouch a lot, inclined my head forward, and in a burst of inspiration, undid the corners of my tricorne so that I was now wearing my hat wide and floppy, more like an Old West sombrero. Two hard discreet shakes, and with the brim flattened out, my translator assured me I now looked like a Methodist preacher or possibly a schoolteacher. I’d have considered going over and applying at Harvard, as a cover, but they never take Yale men there.
At least this way I would only be spotted by people who got close to me. The extra feeling of safety, plus the gradual warming of the morning, made me feel steadily better, and I picked up my pace a little.
I decided to give the transponder another shot, and this time, much to my surprise, there was a faint signal. The direction seemed to point southward, along Charles Street, opposite the direction in which I had been walking, and not having any better plan, I turned and went the other way.
