A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

  She stood in front of him, her arms folded, her shoulders hunched, looking as though she were stood atop a barrel full of dynamite that she needed to jump off, but couldn't because she was afeared any sudden movement might cause the thing to blow.

  “Miss Cady,” he said, “you figured out the watch. You can figure this too. I couldn't, but you can. Just tell me what you're thinking, and we can work out what to do.”

  She did take that breath then. Closed her eyes, breathed in deeply through her nose, and let it out through her mouth like a sprinter getting ready for a big race.

  “Okay,” she said. “Where to start? Fucking quantum theory. Bubble universes. Schrodinger's fucking dead cat in a box. Maybe—”

  “Maybe with less cussing and somewhere I got half a chance of understanding,” he said, taking her gently by the elbow as he tried to lead her away from the dark whirlpool of her thoughts. “Why don't you tell me about your friend Georgia. Did you find out what happened to her?”

  She nodded, and having that one real thing to explain seemed to calm her down. Her eyes narrowed as she looked to the Homeland bunker, perhaps still suspicious that the occupants might somehow be listening in. How they could do that with no windows to speak of, Smith was not sure. But he knew now that almost anything was possible.

  “Do you want to get a little bit further away from them?” he asked. He truly did not want to stray much further afield, not while they still had his watch, but he felt obliged to ask. She was in such obvious distress.

  Cady nodded and cast around for a bolt hole. He knew she'd found her place when her eyes fixed on a storefront across the street and her features hardened, losing their fearful and despondent cast.

  “Over there,” she said. “I want to check a few things online.”

  Smith followed, weaving through the light traffic and into a shop which sold the sort of machines he had seen on the work bench back at her apartment. They shared a feature with her phone—an illuminated screen—but these were much larger. The store was crowded, and the attendants stood out because they were all dressed in the same colored undershirts as each other. Smith did not concern himself with trying to archeologize the future; he did not need to know what she was doing. It was enough that, whatever Cady had planned, it had distracted her from their troubles. She now proceeded with the native resolve of a carnival wrestler, climbing through the ropes, determined to win or to give at least as good as she got.

  Smith was forced to hide a smile. He was warming to her spirit, and that unexpected connection left him just ever so slightly agog. It had been a long time since any woman had engaged his regard. Not since Martha had passed. He jammed his hands into his pockets and stood back from Miss Cady, who was invested in hammering away at what looked like the alphabet keys of a letter typing machine. Smith had seen one in his own time, in a bank. It had given him the impression of being a diabolical trial to maintain, not at all as convenient as a humble quill and ink. But there was no denying the speed and alacrity with which Cady's fingers clickety-clacked over the little pellets with all the letters of the alphabet stenciled on them.

  As she worked, Smith saw the machine's window glass flickering and changing as though it offered a real window into a real and busy world. Images appeared there and screeds of typography. It likely would have unhinged him a few weeks ago, but he had seen stranger mechanical artifacts in other times and places. He had avoided entanglement with them, and was just as happy to leave this operation to his …

  He paused to ponder what she was to him, this strange young woman.

  It seemed they were abroad on an adventure together, so perhaps she was his … bestie? Was that the term? He wondered how she would take to being described as such, and then admonished himself for a fool. She was a beautiful girl, but Miss Cady McCall weren't no buckle bunny, that was for damned sure. There was no riding the long way around her being three or four professors smarter than him. That there was a fact as large and immovable as the Rocky Mountains themselves. She sat, furiously staring and glaring into the magic window of the computational machine, her jaws grinding away as she executed whatever scheme had occurred to her. Smith attempted to hide his own awakening attachment to her, indeed to deny such a thing was even at issue. He kept his face a mask of detachment, occasionally breaking away from her to walk over to the window and spy out the Homeland building across the way. Nothing had changed over there. Once or twice the store clerks in the brightly colored undershirts attempted conversation with him, but he did not respond in kind.

  It was on the third or fourth return leg of a trip to the window that Cady suddenly arose from her machine. She had lost track of him, and he was touched to see she looked a little flustered, even alarmed, until she was able to pick him out of the crowd in the shop. The relief on her face was a wellspring of solace to him, too.

  “Did you get whatever you were after?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Sort of. Let's step outside. We need to get back and get our stuff, or start making trouble about it.”

  “Why?”

  “I'll tell you outside. Come on.”

  Her demeanor had changed. She no longer affected the helpless air of a woman in peril, but the change was not entirely for the good. Her mood was, if anything, darker. Smith said nothing as they left the store and nothing while they walked a short distance to a park bench in a small patch of open ground with a view of the Homeland barracks.

  “Better sit down,” said Cady. “This is gonna take some explaining.”

  “And I don't have the watch,” he reminded her.

  “No,” she agreed. “And more than anything else, we need that thing back.”

  “Because?” he said carefully. “Besides being my only way home.”

  “Our only way home,” Cady corrected him.

  Smith furrowed his brows.

  “I'm already losing the trail.”

  “This isn't my home,” she said, “and we haven't been time traveling.”

  22

  It wasn't the gravest shock he'd been forced to accommodate, but it made less sense than some of the more recent insanities.

  “I don't understand,” he said. “We were just in London in 1888.”

  “Yeah, we were,” she said, “and now we're here and you've been to Christ knows how many places and time zones since you first double-clicked the watch.”

  “But you're saying that weren't time travel?” he said, feeling his moorings beginning to slip.

  “Yes. But, no,” she sighed heavily, more exasperated with herself than by him. “This is hard because you have no reference points. No cultural …” Cady waved her hands about as if hoping to pluck the right words from the air. “No … context. Mark Twain hadn't even written his King Arthur book yet when we were in London. I checked. You first jumped in 1876. Twain didn't publish A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court for another decade or so. I'll put a copy on my phone, by the way. You should probably read it, and the H. G. Wells time travel book, and some others. I'll get you to read them all and maybe watch some movies when we get the hell out of this neo-fascist alterworld.”

  Smith had been barely following up until that point, but as Cady talked, she sped up, and her explanation pulled away from his comprehension and galloped off over the hills.

  “Whoa, just layoff the stirrups, missy. You're right. I got no, whatever you called it, no culture or context, for this. I'm guessing you mean that'd be like you trying to make your way in a Comanche camp or a Pennsylvania Dutch village. You can't begin to understand the big things because you ain't even got a carrying handle on the little ones.”

  She stared at him for a second and then a smile rose on her face like a new dawn.

  “It's a shame you only got a primary school education, Smith. I think there's a very smart guy under all that bristle and bullshit.”

  There were a couple of ways he could choose to take umbrage at that, but Smith decided to let them float past. Instead he rode along on the compliment
she had just sort of paid him.

  “Thanks, I think,” he deadpanned. “Why don't you slow down and see if you're smart enough to explain your complicated postulations to this wooden-headed cowboy.”

  “I'll try my best,” she said. Another quiet, frail smile. “I think what's happening is that every time we use the watch it doesn't just move us up and down a fixed timeline. It couldn't. You'd eventually encounter a grandfather paradox.”

  Cady frowned as if the necessity of having to explain such a thing was more than she should have to bear.

  “Long story short, you can't invent a time machine to go back and kill your grandfather because then you'd never be born to invent the time machine. You see?”

  Smith snorted.

  “I reckon you'd have a whole heap of other problems before you got anywhere near of that one,” he said, “but go on. I understand so far.”

  Cady nodded. She took a few seconds to compose her next thoughts, probably not wanting to get too far ahead of her plodding student. Smith followed her gaze, taking in the late afternoon strollers. Aside from superficial differences like their clothing, the people themselves looked quite commonplace to him. A costume change here and there, a proper bonnet and modest skirt on the ladies, say, and a decent town hat for the menfolk, and they could have walked down any street from his day.

  “So,” Cady went on slowly, choosing each word now as though searching for gold flecks in a stream. “I think every time you jump, or every time we've jumped now, that a … let's see …”

  She made a face, squinting in concentration.

  “… that the watch … builds a whole new timeline, a new history if you like. What I'd call an alternate history, or an expanding quantum bubble universe. But I won't, because you wouldn't understand. I think this place …” she gestured to take in the world around them. “I don't think it is the world two years after I disappeared. My world, I mean. I think it's an alternative to that. A whole new reality.”

  Smith could not help but be troubled by this fantastical line of argument.

  “But what happened to our rightful time?” he said, fearing her answer. He'd always assumed he could eventually get himself back to Elspeth. Cady had all but promised him as much. Now she was pulling that rug out from under his boots.

  “They're still there,” she said. “Be cool. Don't worry. Your daughter is waiting for you, and if we do everything right you will be able to get back to her.”

  Smith closed his eyes. At that precise moment he believed that nobody had ever said anything which meant more to him. He wanted to kiss her. But he didn't, of course, because he had been raised a gentleman, and also, he had not shaved properly in a long while.

  Cady seemed to sense both his torment and relief and she took his hands and squeezed them. They were shaking but he made no effort to pull away.

  “She's still there,” she said again. “My time, too. And I'm pretty sure, or at least I hope, that we can get back to them. But we need the watch.”

  “I guess we'd better go get it then,” he said, opening his eyes and letting out a breath he had not realized he was holding inside.

  “I guess so,” she agreed.

  She was still holding his hands and neither seemed inclined to let go first.

  “Better go,” he said.

  “Better had.”

  And finally they did.

  It were but a short stroll back to the ugly fortress of the Homeland Security, and Cady tried to explain as much as she could while they walked, but there was a fair tale to tell, and she had to pull him up on the grass outside to finish it.

  As Smith had the telling of it from her, there was simply no way their current reality—that's what she called it, the “current reality”—was possible. It could not have come to pass in the short time she had been away. Her principal objection seemed to be political. There was a feller sitting in the White House of whom she did not approve. He almost bellowed with laughter at that, despite the obnoxious character of the situation. Or perhaps because of it. He had seen men laughing like loons as the hangman slipped the noose around the neck.

  “Miss Cady, if'n I thought the whole world had gone wrong just because some lickspittle chancer I did not care for parked his derriere in George Washington's rockin' chair, the world would never be right.”

  “That's not what I mean,” she said, mashing her eyebrows together in a fierce display of feminine disapproval at being told better.

  “Then I apologize. Please do tell me what you did mean and I will do my best to comprehend, notwithstanding all of my bristles and bull … well, all the rest of it.”

  There was a moment where Smith was uncertain whether she'd be able to unmash those eyebrows and get back to her explainifying, but she did.

  “Look. You don't understand. This guy,” she said, slowly, in a tone of voice that all but dared him to interrupt. “This man, Trump. There is no way he could be president. Okay, just take my word for it. It was never going to happen.”

  Try as he might, Smith could not keep the skeptical look off his face. Miss Cady, however, seemed ready for that.

  “Okay, I get it,” she said. “A guy like you, you're the whole reason they invented the southern strategy. But it's not just Trump and the wall and the whole weird-ass Aryan Nation vibe I've been picking up on since this morning and, you know, since we got picked up by the gestapo.”

  She had lost him, but Smith decided to let her get through whatever was giving her such conniptions. It'd be the same with Martha. When the storm blew up, best just to close the shutters and let it blow itself out. He arranged his face in a mask of polite interest and waited until she said something that made sense.

  “They wouldn't let me talk to Georgia,” she said, “but they couldn't stop Calvino and his guys carrying messages between us. What I know is, our personal history here checks out right up until I left that dinner with Georgia and Matt, the BuzzFeed guy. Then I go missing. They end up together. And everything goes sideways. Not because they got together. That was probably always going to happen, even if it was just a one-night stand. But Trump wins the election, and he does exactly what he promised to do, or at least he tries to. Turns out building a giant wall halfway across a continent is not so fucking easy. Deporting ten million people, likewise. So this idiot savant starts rounding up the ten million and sending them down to build his stupid wall, and it's like the most insane, the most destructive, the most hated, and the most popular thing he's ever done. And that's why Georgia is locked up in her own apartment. Home arrest. With a little indentured servitude to her corporate sponsor to sweeten the deal.”

  As she spoke, the color rose in her cheeks and the words started to shoot out of her like bullets from a repeating rifle. Finally, Cady saw how perplexed he was and threw up her hands in surrender.

  “Okay, Okay. I got it. My bad and I'll slow down. Just … just forget all of that. It means nothing to you. It's only important to me.”

  “I'll do my best to make it important to me,” he said. “But yes, it would be a mercy if you could slow down some.”

  “I'm sorry,” she said, and he could see the energy running out of her. “Look. True fact, it's impossible. When I left, the voters were gonna murder Trump and dump his body down a mine shaft. But not here. In this place, the race was neck and neck. And he won.”

  She waved away his objections before he could voice them.

  “Well, maybe he won fair-n-square.”

  “No way!”

  “But what was he promising? What's this wall of his for?”

  “To keep out Mexican rapists.”

  Smith was really confused now.

  “But, Cady, nobody wants rapists in town, Mexican or not. Lord knows I've put a few fellers in the ground for that and less. I just don't see a problem here.”

  “Gah! That is the problem. Men like you are the problem … Look. Fine. We won't talk politics. How about history? I looked up Gracie and Bertie on some genealogy sites. I just wa
nted to see if I could find them. I did.”

  She did not look happy with whatever she had found.

  “They're part of history now.”

  “Well, yeah, I suppose so.”

  “No. You don't understand. Actual history. They're famous. They've been studied for over a hundred years. They were the only victims of Jack the Ripper who didn't match the profile.”

  Smith could see that was supposed to mean something, but he shrugged, apologetically, because to him it didn't.

  Cady closed her eyes and counted to three.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Again. My bad. So, context. Jack the Ripper was a famous murderer. The first celebrity serial killer. That's like a murderer who goes from one victim to the next, and just doesn't get caught until he's stacked the bodies so high they tumble down on top of him or something. Anyway, Jack didn't. Get caught, I mean. He killed half a dozen women, prostitutes in London, at the same time we were there. And now Gracie and Bertie. And people have been arguing about why them ever since.”

  Understanding was starting to dawn on him.

  “And this Jack Ripper, he didn't do for them originally? That's only happened since we was there?”

  Cady looked inconsolably sad.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I see,” he muttered, but he didn't. Not clearly. “Are you implying that Chumley was this Jack feller? Not one of my apprentices?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying,” she said, sounding defeated. “None of this makes any sense. It’s insane. All of it.”

  Smith felt the need of dragging her back onto a sunlit path before she became utterly lost in her melancholy.

  “Was there anything else got you to pondering this new idea of yours?”

  He saw her consciously pick up her sadness and put it to one side. It was still there, but she'd pushed it out of the way where it wouldn't stop her moving forward.

  “A few things,” she said. “I'd need a couple of hours of access to really nail it down, and I was never much of a history student anyway, but I'm pretty sure World War II ended in 1945, not 1946. And Australia doesn't speak French.”