by Anthology
“There’s only one door out of this room.” And Tylney had his back to it. He could hear people moving, a voice calling out, seeking the source of that cry.
“Sir Edmund, shield your eyes.” The clerk raised something to his own eye, a flat piece of metal no bigger than a lockplate, and rather like a lockplate, with a round hole in the middle.
Tylney stepped forward instead and grabbed the clerk’s arm. “What are you doing?”
The man paused, obviously on the verge of shoving Tylney to the floor, and stared at him. “Damn it to hell,” he said. “All right, look. I’m trying to save this play.”
“From the fires?”
“From oblivion,” he said. He dropped his arm and turned the plate so Tylney could see the back of it. His thumb passed over a couple of small nubs marked with red sigils, and Tylney gasped. As if through a camera obscura, the image of a page of The Ile of Dogges floated on a bit of glass imbedded in the back of the plate, as crisp and brightly lit as if by brilliant day. It wasn’t the page to which the play lay open. “My name’s Baldassare,” the clerk—the sorcerer—said. “I’m here to preserve this play. It was lost.”
“Jonson’s summoned demons,” Tylney whispered, as someone pounded on the office door. It rattled, and did not open. Baldassare must have claimed the keys when he dragged Tylney inside, and fastened the lock while Tylney was still bedazzled. The light of the candle would show under the door, though. The servants would know he was here.
It was his private office, and Tylney had one of only two keys. Someone would have to wake the steward for the other.
He could shout. But Baldassare could kill him before the household could break down the door. And the sorcerer was staring at him, one eyebrow lifted, as if to see what he would do.
Tylney held his tongue, and the door rattled once more before footsteps retreated.
“Just a historian,” Baldassare answered, when the silence had stretched a minute or two.
“Historian? But the play’s not three months old!”
Baldassare shook his head. “Where I come from, it’s far older. And it’s—” He hesitated, seeming to search for a word. “It’s dead. No one has ever read it, or seen it performed. Most people don’t even know it once existed.” He laid fingertips on the papers, caressing. “Let me take it. Let me give it life.”
“It’s sedition.” Tylney grasped the edge of the script, greatly daring, and pulled it from under Baldassare’s hand.
“It’s brilliant,” Baldassare said, and Tylney couldn’t argue, though he bundled the papers close to his chest. The sorcerer had been strangely gentle with him, as a younger man with an older. Perhaps he could gamble on that. Perhaps. It was his duty to protect the queen.
Baldassare continued, “None will know, no one shall read it, not until you and Elizabeth and Jonson and Nashe are long in your graves. It will do no harm. I swear it.”
“A sorcerer’s word,” Tylney said. He stepped back, came up hard against the door. The keys weren’t in the lock. They must be in Baldassare’s hand.
“Would you have it lost forever? Truly?” Baldassare reached and Tylney crowded away. Into the corner, the last place he could retreat. “Sir Edmund!” someone shouted from the hall.
From outside the door, Tylney heard the jangle of keys, their rattle in the lock. “You’ll hang,” he said to Baldassare.
“Maybe,” Baldassare said, with a sudden grin that showed his perfect, white teeth. “But not today.” One lingering, regretful look at the papers crumpled to Tylney’s chest, and he dropped the keys on the floor, touched something on the wrist of the hand that held the metal plate, and vanished in a shimmer of air as Tylney gaped after him.
The door burst open, framing Tylney’s steward, John, against blackness.
Tylney flinched.
“Sir Edmund?” The man came forward, a candle in one hand, the keys in the other. “Are you well?”
“Well enough,” Tylney answered, forcing himself not to crane his neck after the vanished man. He could claim a demon had appeared in his work room, right enough. He could claim it, but who would believe?
He swallowed, and eased his grip on the play clutched to his chest. “I dropped the keys.”
The steward frowned doubtfully. “You cried out, milord.”
“I stumbled only,” Tylney said. “I feared for the candle. But all is well.” He laid the playscript on the table and smoothed the pages as his steward squatted to retrieve the fallen keys. “I thank you your concern.”
The keys were cool and heavy, and clinked against each other like debased coins when the steward handed them over. Tylney laid them on the table beside the candle and the play. He lifted the coin purse from the window ledge, flicked the drapes back, and weighted the pages with the money once more before throwing wide the shutters, heedless of the night air. It was a still summer night, the stink of London rising from the gutters, but a draft could always surprise you, and he didn’t feel like chasing paper into corners.
The candle barely flickered. “Sir Edmund?”
“That will be all, John. Thank you.”
Silently, the steward withdrew, taking his candle and his own keys with him. He left the door yawning open on darkness. Tylney stood at his table for a moment, watching the empty space.
He and John had the only keys. Baldassare had come and gone like a devil stepping back and forth from Hell. Without the stink of brimstone, though. Perhaps more like an angel. Or memory, which could walk through every room in Tylney’s house, through every playhouse in London, and leave no sign.
Tylney bent on creaking knees and laid kindling on the hearth. He stood, and looked at the playscript, one-quarter of the pages turned where it rested on the edge of his writing table, the other three-fourths crumpled and crudely smoothed. He turned another page, read a line in Jonson’s hand, and one in Nashe’s. His lips stretched over his aching teeth, and he chuckled into his beard.
He laid the pages down. No more sense than a tabby cat. It was late for making a fire. He could burn the play in the morning. Before he returned Jonson’s bribe. He’d lock the door behind him, so no one could come in or out. There were only two sets of keys.
Sir Edmund Tylney blew the candle out, and trudged upstairs through the customary dark.
In the morning, he’d see to the burning.
Manhattan
September 16, 1920
She didn’t want to go to work this morning. Normally, Philippa couldn’t wait to leave the tiny two-room walkup she shared with five other women. The place smelled of grease and dirt so old that no amount of bleach would get it out. She had tried to clean the flat when she realized she would have to live like everyone else in this godforsaken century. She scrubbed the place until her hands were raw, and made no difference whatsoever.
Ambition was cold comfort when you shared a mattress with two other women—girls in 1920 parlance—neither of whom had bathed in the last week. The flat had two windows, both of which overlooked the brick building next door. No breezes, no sunlight.
Not that it mattered. She stayed out of the flat as much as she could, coming back to sleep and change clothes. She probably smelled no better than her companions. The bathroom was down the hall, the bathtub foul, and the toilet an atrocity.
She’d been counting the days to September 16, not because that was the day she’d been waiting for, but because she’d be able to go home, real home, bathe, sleep in a bed with Egyptian cotton sheets, and turn on the air conditioning, even if she didn’t need it.
For the first time in her entire career, she missed the middle of the twentyfirst century. She missed it with a mad passion, realizing that with all the rising sea levels, the incredible population growth, the poverty that no one could quite wipe out, the life she led there was one of privilege, even though she associated more with the upper class here than she ever had there.
Still, she stood at the door of her apartment building, and looked up at the azure sky. A perfect
blue, the temperature in the low sixties, promising to be one of those spectacular New York days, the kind that made you wonder why you lived anywhere else. The city, about to enter its ascendancy in American life, glowed under the September sun.
People were walking outside and gazing upward, some even smiling, probably planning a series of errands that would get them out of the office. Folks who worked outside had smirks of superiority; they got paid to be outside.
A few people were probably thinking ahead to lunch, planning to splurge at one of the food carts, and maybe even sit on one of the benches lined up along the streets or head to one of the city’s parks, if only for a few minutes. A few snatched minutes that no one would ever get.
She shuddered. She’d been in Manhattan before on a perfect September day. On one of her first jobs, in fact. She’d stood not far from here and gazed upward at a building that wasn’t even a glimmer in someone’s eye this morning, and watched, at 8:46 a.m., as American Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center’s north tower.
The same sort of sunshine. Same kind of optimism in the air.
Only then that crisis had been more deadly, using weapons not yet dreamed of, hitting a building impossible to build in this time period, while an entire nation watched on a machine that Philo Farnsworth wouldn’t even imagine for another year.
That day had been hard, but she had been prepared. She had watched the footage, read the accounts, talked to others who had also visited September 11th. And that day had been the final test in her training: could she maintain her composure as people jumped to their deaths to escape flames, as buildings pancaked around her, as first responders who wouldn’t live out the day ran past her to save as many lives as possible?
She had been, in the words of her instructor, “positively bloodless.” He had meant that as a compliment, and she had taken it that way. “Positively bloodless,” meant she kept her composure, did her job, and got out with a minimum of notification and a minimum of fuss.
Yes, she had nightmares. Everyone did; it was part of the job. But they weren’t debilitating, and she was able to work through the worst of them with the therapist the department had assigned her.
She was, in other words, a stellar candidate, the best of her class. A woman who had since completed dozens of difficult assignments.
A woman who did not want to walk to the corner of Wall and Broad on this beautiful September morning. A woman who did not want to enter the House of Morgan to take her lowly secretary’s desk with its fancy expensive Underwood typewriter, something she had been instructed to be very, very careful with because it was delicate. It wasn’t delicate. The damn thing was a tank and it would take a sledgehammer to destroy it.
She would wager, if she had anyone to wager with, that the Underwood would survive today’s bombing with nary a scratch.
She sighed, and stepped into the sea of humanity. Only four hours left, and she needed to make the most of them.
Washington, DC
March 23, 2057 (supposedly)
Assistant Attorney General Preston Lane needed a moment to process the information the four people behind him had just presented.
He pivoted and faced floor-to-ceiling window of his office in the Time Department’s building. The building was known as the Bubble for a variety of reasons. The first was obvious: its round glass shape looked like a bubble. But the second was because it was protected by time bubble after time bubble after time bubble. “Time bubbles” were the nickname for “time-guards.” In some ways, time bubble was more accurate, in that the bubble froze a time period into place.
He worked here instead of the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice building (which was a nice, but old building) because the Time Division of the Justice Department, like all time-related government departments, had offices here. The Bubble protected all who served.
The yard outside was in full spring bloom. Cherry trees lined the wall, their blossoms in full pink flower. The green grass, the emerging foliage, all spoke of a fantastic DC spring.
Which hadn’t quite arrived in DC yet.
The permanent staff blew smoke up his ass about the yard. It’s enclosed, so it follows its own schedule, the head gardener told him when he’d asked. Think of it like a greenhouse.
A greenhouse with a manipulated timer. He’d gone into the archives shortly after receiving his assignment and looked. This year’s cherry blossoms mimicked last year’s weather. Last year, the trees had reached full bloom by the end of March, just like they had for the past thirty years. This year, the trees outside the Bubble had returned to their April schedule, the one that had made this city and its cherry trees justly famous.
Plants didn’t cooperate inside a time bubble. If you wanted plants to bloom and grow, they actually needed care, just like they would in a greenhouse. If you wanted to pretend that they followed the same schedule as the outside world, you didn’t speed up the timeline or import different plants from different time periods. You set the yard’s chronometer to its own schedule, and prayed that it worked like the rest of the world.
Which it did not. The world was/is/will always be a messy place. For the plants inside the yard, the world had an unbreakable schedule, and theoretically, the entire staff enjoyed that.
It made his skin crawl. All of this did. The deeper he got into his assignment, the more unhappy he became.
Especially with the Wall Street case.
Before he got appointed to the Time Division, someone on staff had noticed that Manhattan’s financial district had been time-guarded from mid-August to mid-September 1920. Time-guards in the United States needed approval from the Time Department. The Secretary of Time had claimed she knew nothing of this, and indeed, there were no records of who or what had installed that bubble.
Plus, the bubble did not conform to government regulations.
Government-formed time bubbles existed throughout the United State’s history, and they also existed now. The White House had its own time bubble, as did Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Pentagon. All of the buildings housing the Cabinet had them as well. Not every place could be protected—if someone could easily get to a United States Representative, for example, because the country did not have enough money to protect district offices. The money instead went to time-guarding polling places on each and every election day in the country, no matter how small the election.
Lane did not have the ability to reset time. Officially, no one did. But he suspected someone held that power unofficially, and that someone or those someones existed in the very government he served.
But the answer to that question was above his pay grade.
What happened to Philippa D’Arco, however, was not.
Lane took a deep breath. He’d go out into the yard and walk among the cherry blossoms if he weren’t allergic to the damn things. Because he needed to move.
But he couldn’t, because he had to finish this meeting. He turned his back on the windows. Wilhelmina Rutger and her three assistants still stood behind him, ignoring the comfortable chairs and the hollow tables that allowed for some selected time viewing.
His wife would be furious. He was supposed to accompany her on some important dinner for her hedge-fund business. She had probably given up on him anyway. She didn’t understand the government’s mandate: anyone who worked in the Bubble had to take a second oath, vowing to never ever use time travel for personal gain. Even if that gain was keeping peace in a marriage already on the rocks.
He forced his attention back to the problem at hand—not his problem, but the division’s problem. They were related, after all.
“Okay, let me see if I get this straight.” He had started so many conversations like this in the six months since his appointment. Time travel’s complexities made his brain hurt. “D’Arco had ten windows for return and missed all of them, which is, apparently, unlike her. She’s also the first investigator we’ve sent to the September 16th bombing who failed to return.”
&nb
sp; “Yes.” Wilhelmina was petite and blond, with a friendly face completely at odds with her take-no-prisoners personality. “Philippa’s body didn’t return either, which is our failsafe.”
Wilhelmina peered at him, as if she were testing whether or not he actually knew that. He wasn’t sure he did. He tried not to look even more creeped out. He hated the way that people just vanished when they stepped into the time chamber, even if the vanishing was only for a moment or two. He didn’t want to think about how he’d feel if they came back a few seconds later as a corpse.
“In other words this is extremely unusual.” Lane sighed again, and swept his hand at the chairs. “Let’s sit.”
They did. He frowned at the assistants, having no idea who they were. Wilhelmina always seemed to bring a different set of assistants to every meeting. Lane wasn’t sure if that was because she couldn’t keep assistants or if her assistants swapped out due to those time complexities.
“Philippa is the first woman we’ve sent to the Wall Street bombing,” Wilhelmina said. “Our previous investigators were all men. The first one arrived just after the time bubble burst, 12:01 p.m. on September 16, 1920, one minute after the bomb went off. He couldn’t even get into the bomb site at Wall and Broad. We tried to have our second investigator arrive at 12:02 p.m., and he couldn’t do that. He could travel outside the time bubble around the financial district, but he couldn’t time-travel inside it within hours of that explosion. We sent our third investigator to Manhattan one month before the explosion with the idea that he would get a job that would allow him to investigate the entire area, and see if the historical record is missing something that we should know.”
Lane remembered now. “That last guy is the reason we ended up sending Philippa.”
“Yes.” Wilhelmina smiled, even though the smile did not go to her eyes. The smile said, We’ve had this conversation and you should remember it. All of it. I hate repeating myself. Sir.
