by John Barnes
“And what we found out they had in mind was to take the advanced technology we had brought in and turn it against these people. If there had been an American Revolution in this timeline, and that’s what they were trying to start, there would have been literally millions of deaths—it would have looked like the Civil War of your timeline—and the development of all sorts of charming things like machine guns, barbed wire, and poison gas, plus bombing cities from aircraft, in the European phase of the war. Britain would have conquered the world and left the world bitter, bruised, and ready for more rebellions. You’d have ended up with a single absolutist British monarchy holding down a world empire by sheer bloody force …”
“And that’s the point where the Closers would have moved in and taken over the top of the operation for themselves,” I said. “Yep, that’s what they always do. Well, in light of their known behavior it makes sense.”
“We’ve gotten ten times the documents on this that we’ve ever had before, Mark. The intelligence people all want to kiss you.”
“Hmm. Well, I could take applications, maybe—”
“Or you could abjure quantity for quality, and take me.”
“Deal.” It was a good deal, too, though I think we slightly annoyed the other passengers. It wasn’t a very demonstrative century.
It turned out that because the two Georges had been so different—one so obviously trying to put people at their ease and make them feel appreciated, the other so clearly brutal—that the allegation, especially in the wake of the disastrous fire and the more than a hundred deaths in the protests, had sent the country up like a powder keg. Every single one of the fifty-nine lords and politicians the true King had written to had declared for him, and the Navy had gone over immediately. The invasion and civil war that they had thought they might have to fight had in fact collapsed completely as the Army, in turn, went over; before the real George III had even stepped off the boat in Dover, the false one was under arrest.
“He’s got a terrible mess to clean up, but there’s a huge reserve of goodwill,” Chrys said. “It looks like this timeline is back on track—and in fact they think they’re already getting signals when they’re looking for its descendant lines, way up in the future. You’ve probably helped bring billions of people into freedom and prosperity.”
We talked of other things as well, and most especially, though it was painful, we talked about just how tough it was going to be if I wanted to change … if I didn’t want to end up the mirror image of the man I had killed.
I was glad Chrys was there to talk about it with.
I had said Calais wasn’t a complete surprise, but it was still pretty impressive. The Royal Navy had dispatched a fast steamer to take us over to London; the next day there was to be a major parade, and then the King was going to begin the process of revealing the existence of ATN, the sources of help they had had … and to start the long, fast march toward full membership in our league of civilized and free timelines. They’d be there before my home timeline was ever even found; in a way I envied them that, and in another way I was glad we were spared the crosstime wars as long as we were.
The parade and ceremonies were impressive, but our work here was done—a new special agent would be coming out to replace Rey Luc, and we were due to return to headquarters.
Captain Malecela himself was there for the debriefing; that, more than anything else, told me that what had been captured was vital.
“It’s the first major link,” he said, with a deep smile cutting into one corner of his face, yet at the same time with a ferocity in his eyes that I would have found frightening had I been on the other side. “It is just possible that their whole reason for hunting you, Strang, is that they had established that the series of disasters we are preparing for them began from intelligence captured due to your mission. That is one hypothesis, anyway.” He sat back and sighed, opening a refrigerator door; Athenian offices are designed to be comfortable places to eat a meal rather than to work, because Athenians think of paperwork and that sort of thing as something you do at home, and the office is where you entertain guests. “If you two would care for beer, we are officially off duty; I’ve also got a wide range of cold meats and cheeses, and more kinds of bread than I would have imagined existed.”
We made sandwiches and poured beer; then I cautiously said, “Captain, you said that that was one hypothesis. It sounded very much like it was one you don’t believe.”
“That’s absolutely right,” Malecela agreed. “I don’t believe it at all, in fact. I think this is the first step, but your close connection with all the timelines descended from your own that seem to be of so much importance—and that one of the few names we know for sure will be vital coming out of your home time is Porter Brunreich, who of course is your ward … well, my guess is that in some way we don’t quite understand, you yourself are a point of temporal discontinuity, a place where history itself can change in a big way. If you like, you’re a walking crux, Strang.
“We’ve also noted that you improvise very well, you get missions carried out, and perhaps most importantly—you seem to be lucky. That might just be significant in its own right. History is constantly trying to find its own channel and to move in its own way. That’s why some timelines are so hard to start, and some are so easy; there is something up ahead, many centuries in the future, something that is beautiful or wonderful or terrible—but it’s calling all the timelines to itself, and when it finds someone who will help it go where it wants to, he becomes lucky.”
“What if it’s on the Closers’ side?” I asked. “I mean, maybe the future that is calling is calling them, not us.”
“If that’s the case, we might as well all lie down and die. Or just find somewhere to party until they come and kill us. Does either of you feel like that?”
Chrys and I had to grin.
“Now,” Malecela said, “I have one simple issue and one complicated one. Mark Strang, by virtue of the fact that when you are out and working in the field, good things appear to happen for ATN, we are going to make you a Special Crux Operative. It’s a new designation. What it means is that we’ll be dropping you into much hairier, more dangerous cruxes, with a much wider latitude of action—but also with more resources available. That’s the simple issue.”
“I’m very honored,” I said. “But really all I did was—”
Malecela grinned at me again. “Now, now, in the first place, you don’t have to tell me it’s an honor. I can only say I envy you the contribution you’ll be able to make, and I think it’s wonderful for someone at the beginning of a career to be given this. But the fact is that it was a pure engineering decision—we didn’t decide that we ought to do this, the scientists looked at it and said you’re a good bet. That’s why it’s such a simple decision—I’m not making it, I’m just informing you of it.
“Now, it happens that there’s another and more complex decision. We would like to assign one other Crux Op who will work with you closely, as your personal assistant, on a permanent basis. This would also improve security around Porter Brunreich, of course, but the main purpose is to have an additional observer wherever you are. But despite the fact that we counted your first expedition retroactively, giving you several years in grade … well, we realize you don’t know many Crux Ops. There are really only two you have ever worked with closely … Ariadne Lao—who by the way has said she would happily accept such an assignment, despite being ten years senior to you in the service—and Chrysamen ja N’wook. Now, there are arguments either way; a relatively new agent can more quickly become used to your way of doing things, a more experienced agent may have additional information you will find valuable … but I thought there was the possibility, since you may be working together for decades, that there might be some personal preference involved …”
“There sure as hell is,” I said, and then realized Chrysamen’s interpreted voice in my earpiece had said the same thing.
It took us a while to g
et everything together, but finally the day came when I stepped through the gateway at ATN Crux Operations Central and into the locked bathroom of an airliner bound from Denver to Pittsburgh, trading places with one of our couriers, who had gotten onto the flight. I returned to my seat and had just settled in when Chrys slid into the seat beside me.
She was thoroughly nervous, but I put my hand on her arm and said, “Now, it’s the best possible start. The Fourth of July dinner is sacred to Dad and Carrie, and Porter has gotten to be just the same way. And I’ve missed more of them than anyone else, so now it’s always regarded as a treat when I’m there. You’re going to pick up a lot of points just for attending.”
She squeezed my hand and whispered under her breath, “Just remember, I come from a culture with arranged marriages.”
“You’ve always got the option of just being a working associate,” I pointed out, gently. “I don’t want you to feel pressured—”
“Bite your tongue. I’m nervous, that’s all,” she said, and moved closer to me.
Dad’s a rotten driver, so Robbie drove to pick us up at the airport; Carrie and Porter had come along. This was the scary part for me, too, I realized, and wondered why I wasn’t nervous. Maybe history was letting me know it was on my side again or something.
“Dad, Carrie, Porter, Robbie, this is Chrys,” I said.
They all said “Hello,” except for Porter, who said, “Yeah, right. Bring in the most gorgeous woman in the universe and introduce her like she’s someone you met bowling. It’s good to have you home, Mark—you haven’t changed a bit.”
-AFTERWORD-
Once again, this book comes with a deep debt of gratitude—to the inspired loons of the Alternate History discussions in the Science Fiction Round Table of the GEnie electronic network. Special thanks this time are due to:
Kevin O’Donnell, Jr., Jon Bunnell, P. “Calamity” Drye, Robert Brown, William Harris, Steve Stirling, Dana Carson, S. “Lemming” Weinberg, G. Tan, and Al Nofi.
And again as always, mistakes, errors, and anything you caught me at should be attributed entirely to me.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Timeline Wars
1
Chrysamen was looking sad, and since she has huge dark eyes, she’s good at looking sad. Though we were running just a little late if we wanted to get to the Met without rushing, I knew, after some years of marriage, that it was better to talk about whatever it was than to try to brush it off until there was time to talk about it, so I sat down next to her, and said, “Is something the matter?”
“Not a lot, just a minor case of frustration.” She tossed her dark curls with her hands and shook her head, as if working out a kink in her neck.
“Anything you want to talk about?”
“Oh, just realizing I’m probably never going to lose back the three pounds I put on after we had Perry, and that even if I’m physically a lot younger, I’m almost fifty.”
I shook my head. “On the same scale, I’m fifty-three. That’s what a lot of time travel will do for you. And in this timeline we’re both still under forty, legally; heck, in this timeline you’re minus seven hundred something. Figure that if the life-extension drugs work as well on us as they do on Ariadne Lao—”
Mistake to mention our boss. Ariadne is a charming, pleasant, usually polite person, but there was once a slight spark of interest between us—long before I met Chrys, mind you—and Ariadne is pretty stunning, thanks to the long-life drugs, even though she must be past eighty. Consequently “Ariadne Lao” is an extremely bad thing to mention when Chrys is feeling unattractive.
A few years of marriage gives you enough experience to recognize that you’ve said something stupid, when it’s only a little bit too late. I put an arm around Chrys, and said, “Look, we’re actually only about a fifth of the way through our life spans. I mean, through what our life spans would be if we were in a normal line of work. We both might be shot dead next week, of course.”
“You certainly know how to cheer a girl up.”
“Well, damn it, it’s hard to work up sympathy for you when half the women on the planet would kill to look like you.”
“That’s more like it,” she said, smiling, and stood up and stretched. That was a view I enjoyed a lot; she had on all the lingerie but hadn’t yet put on her dress (one of those little black things that seem to be part of the dress code for women at the opera). She has a mass of dark curly hair, high cheekbones and a full mouth, very light brown skin, and an athlete’s body that I know, in several different ways, is all hard muscle, no matter how well shaped it is.
“And as far as self-confidence is concerned, Mark, that leer from you is all I needed.”
“I am not leering.”
“You’re right. It’s more like the way a lion looks at a gazelle.”
“Rrrrr.”
“Not now, dear, but hold the thought. You look pretty terrific in the tux, yourself.” She slipped into the dress and turned to be zipped up, and I figured we’d gotten past this little attack of the blues with no harm done, but then she said, “I was just thinking … well, it may be silly.”
“If it bothers you, it’s not silly,” I said, pulling up her zipper.
“Well, it’s just … you and I are doing our part, certainly, in the war against the Closers. And ATN seems to be doing pretty well in the fight, though with millions of fronts it’s hard to tell. But even if we’re really clobbering them, as far as I can see, we’ll still be fighting them a thousand years from now. You and I will grow old and die—or get shot or blown up—and so will Porter and Perry … and the war will go on, and more people will be born and grow old and die, and the war will go on, and maybe we’ll be as far in the past as the time of Christ before the war is won.”
“You can’t let yourself think like that,” I said. “We have a lot to do, and we’re just two Crux Ops; ATN has thousands like us, and we just do our parts and hope for the best. I’m sure somewhere there are generals or field marshals or something who are paid to worry about that, but it’s not our lookout.”
She sighed. “Oh, I don’t mean I think it’s being badly run, and I know as well as you do that it’s the fight in front of us, and the next one, not the last one, we have to worry about. All I mean is … well, why haven’t they sent back word about who wins? Does the war just go on forever?”
“Maybe they’re afraid of changing the result by letting us know,” I said. “We need to get moving if we’re going to get to the opera in time for me to show you off to the other guys.”
We had imposed a firm rule ages ago. Since this timeline is not aware of the war that rages across a million timelines, we don’t discuss ATN business anywhere where we might be overheard. If you think waiters and cabbies are nosy about your marriage or your job, imagine what they’d be like about the fate of whole universes. So we went to the opera, chatted mostly about my ward Porter Brunreich’s career (at eighteen she was having a very successful European tour, and nowadays she was mostly performing her own compositions for organ and piano), our three-year-old son Perry (we both agree he’s a genius, and handsome, too), and that sort of thing. We were pleased to note that the cab driver agreed with us.
Placido Domingo was wonderful as always, Rigoletto was terrific (the director and designers stuck to the story), and for that matter the coffee and cheesecake afterward were great. (Sure, Lindy’s is a cliché, but they got to be a cliché by being worth going back to.)
Chrys came from a timeline where opera had never developed—it was good that the special language chip behind the ear allowed her to speak English without an accent, because if anyone had asked her nationality, “Arabo-Polynesian” would undoubtedly have raised a lot of questions. Three days after she came here to marry me, she was idly playing with the radio when she hit WQED in Pittsburgh, the local classical station—and that was it. Hopeless addiction. There aren’t a lot of Pittsburghers with season tickets at the Met—that’s a lot of airplane tickets in add
ition—but we’re two of them.
As Dad said to me, if you find you’re married to a junkie, your choices are to try for a cure, which rarely works, or to take up the needle yourself. At least it was only opera she’d gotten hooked on. It could have been heavy metal.
I thought she’d forgotten all about her early case of the blues. But that evening, as I closed the door on our hotel room again, she said, “It’s such a beautiful world, Mark. Yours, and the one I came from, and all the millions of others. And if there weren’t Closers, we could open the gates between them and let more people see them all. I’m sure we’ll win. I just wish we could win during my lifetime, or our children’s. I’d like to be around to enjoy it.”
“Me too,” I said, surprising myself a little. I’d always been the much more eager killer of the two of us—Chrys came from a timeline that had been conquered by the Closers, and then liberated a couple of generations later by ATN forces, and you’d think she’d have more hate for them. But Chrys’s people were largely pacifists when they were conquered, and the bitter war of liberation afterward had sickened them so much that there were only a few aberrant ones, like Chrys, who could bear fighting at all.
Me? I’d lost half my family, including my first wife, to them, and a lot of friends along the way, and there had been a time in my life when nothing gave me a rush of pleasure like pulling the trigger on a Closer bastard. When ATN agents—including Ariadne, the first Crux Op I’d ever met—had turned up and recruited me, shown me who was behind the terrorist group I was after, and armed me to hit back at them, I’d become a kind of killing machine for a while.
