Patton's Spaceship (The Timeline Wars, 1)

by John Barnes

  All right. The Brunreich case. Porter Brunreich had talked to me quite a bit. Mrs. Brunreich jumping me while I was fighting her crazy husband the first time. Another fight with Brunreich in the airport, and getting my hand hurt. Robbie and Paula getting me home to bed. Yep, all there. So now I should be waking up and deciding to get a shower and some chow and a beer—

  Wrong. Then the buzzer would go off and Harry Skena would be standing outside my office door.

  Unfortunately all the memories I had connected with Harry Skena were every bit as vivid as the ones I had connected with the goofy Brunreich family. Right down to the call to Dad. No, if I was having a hallucination, I couldn’t find the point where I had slipped over into it. So chances were that when I opened my eyes I’d be somewhere I’d never seen before.

  I was right. The room was a pleasant soft blue color, very clean, obsessively cheerful, and bare. I knew I was in a hospital right away.

  I sat up in bed and looked at my right hand. It was perfectly fine, though the nails were kind of long—which is odd in a guy who bites his nails as much as I do. Then I checked the other hand, and those nails were pretty much as always.

  Getting out of bed to look for a toilet, I decided if this was the future, it was amazing that they still hadn’t invented hospital gowns that fastened in the back. I also noted that there wasn’t the funny twinge a cold floor always gave me in the ankle that got broken in the bomb attack, five years back; in fact the long white scar where the surgeons had gone in to fix it was gone, too.

  “If you need a toilet,” a pleasant, friendly voice from nowhere said, “put your hand on the black bar on the wall to the right.”

  I looked, saw what looked like a strip of black duct tape sticking to the blue wallpaper, and put my hand on it. A door slid open, and there was a small, comfortable-looking seat, very low to the ground. “Push the red button to dilate the seat,” the voice said. It didn’t seem to be in my ears; more like in my head.

  I pushed the button and a hole formed in the seat; I used the thing more or less the way I would at home, and a voice said, “Push the blue button for a wash,” so I did and what happened was startling but not unpleasant, and no different really from a bidet … when I stood up the hole in the toilet closed, and I heard a gurgling noise that I assumed was the flush. Well, clearly, in this part of the future no one was ever going to complain about men leaving the seat up.

  The voice told me that if I pushed another black strip, I’d find temporary clothing “while yours is being repaired,” so I did, and sure enough there was a soft unitard-like thing that the voice assured me was underwear (it turned out to have a built-in jock), a comfortable coverall to put on over it, and a pair of perfectly fitting slippers that were shaped a bit like high-top sneakers and automatically contracted to grasp my feet and ankles when I put them on. It told me to go back to the bathroom and push the red button for the toilet again; I put the hospital gown in there, and it closed up and gurgled.

  I had a question, and experimentally I tried just thinking it. Who was this voice?

  “I am a module installed in your brain temporarily, to allow you to understand our language and to explain customs and situations to you as they come up. I am physically located in a small socket just below your right ear. If you pluck me out, you will stop hearing me, but the local language will become unintelligible.”

  It made a certain amount of sense—enough for the moment anyway—and I wondered what I was supposed to do now. It turned out that the chip in my head didn’t know either, so probably someone was coming to tell me. Or us. I wasn’t sure I knew what to make of this “passenger,” though as a way of acquiring a language it beat the hell out of memorizing verb conjugations.

  There was a knock at the door, and I said, “Come in,” realizing my mouth was forming some other words entirely. A door opened where there had just been blank wall, and Harry Skena came in, which confirmed one part of my memories, followed by Ariadne Lao, which confirmed another part. “The hospital said you were up and getting dressed, Mister Strang,” Ariadne explained. I noticed I really wanted to be invited to call her by first name, but the voice in my head said that even in the best of circumstances that was going to take a long time—this was a polite society.

  The chip also told me it wasn’t anywhere near time to ask her to call me by my first name. “I seem to be a lot better,” I said. “And, um—my hand, I thought, was—”

  “That was the major thing we had you in here for. You’re young, healthy, and resilient enough to be able to deal with a slightly unbelievable situation—or rather with one you’ve never had to believe before. We injected you with nanos, Mr. Strang—that’s a word your culture has just coined, and you won’t actually have the thing the name goes with for a while yet, but what they are is tiny machines that can duplicate the work of cells in your body. In this particular case they swam around in your hand marking the damaged tissue to be destroyed and causing the healthy tissue to grow in to replace it. They also have a tendency to get loose in the body and fix anything else that looks like damage, so if you’ve lost any old scars or badly healed injuries, it’s with our compliments, but if you’ve lost any tattoos, piercing, or scars you were proud of, do let us know, and we can restore them.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty happy with the quality of work,” I said.

  She smiled slightly. “You’d be surprised how many people are upset when they find their pierced ears and noses have been completely healed—or that a tattoo that took months has vanished overnight.” Then she turned to Skena. “You’re the one who knows both cultures, Citizen Skena. What do you suggest?”

  Skena chuckled a little. “Well, let me think a bit … it’s been a long cultural leap for me, too. But if you didn’t find the view of space too disorienting, Mr. Strang, then perhaps we could go out on one of the terraces, have something to drink, and have a long talk. First question—do you accept, for the moment, that this place is real, and you are really here?”

  The question took me a bit aback because I had been doing my best to ignore it for quite a while. There was the remarkable fact that everything stayed consistent—in my dreams, places and people usually flowed into each other. And how often do you meet strangers in a dream? And also, although this place was obviously a century or so advanced beyond my own time, it was consistently advanced and in ways I believed. It made sense that when a space station got big enough, since you’d only have “artificial gravity” at the rim, you’d use airplanes and blimps to get around inside. The little translator voice was like something out of the Time magazine article about cyberpunk. And maybe the most convincing thing of all was that toilet, which seemed like something you might find in a Neiman-Marcus catalog in ten years or so. And the fact was too that my experience was continuous—I fell asleep and I woke up, but that was the only interruption, and even that was normal, right down to the normal-for-me waking up wishing that I were somewhere else at some other time.

  I could go on thinking of this as a hallucination if I tried, but I couldn’t make myself feel that it was a hallucination. I suppose I could have thought Pittsburgh to be a hallucination, too, but the reality of the concrete and brick, wind and rain, traffic noise and strangers would have convinced me pretty fast.

  “I think this place is real,” I said, “and I think that I’m not crazy. Or at least not crazy in seeing this place; I reserve the right to be crazy independently.”

  Ariadne Lao snickered, and said, “Good enough.” A smile from her was worth a lot at that point. Harry Skena opened the door—I noticed that now that it had been opened from the outside, it had somehow grown one of those black “door-open buttons”—and we walked out onto a pleasant, rambling gallery that overlooked a big, parklike commons a few stories below.

  “This is a beautiful place,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Harry Skena hadn’t lost his Pittsburgh accent yet. “I’m always glad to get back. Unfortunately they don’t rotate us very often.” We
walked along the long gallery, looking out over the parklike malls and terraces below. Many people seemed to be out just enjoying the day.

  “Is this all a hospital?” I asked.

  Ariadne made a strange face. I realized the word “hospital” had not passed through the automatic processor, or had been left alone, so that it came out in English. It had somehow felt funny in my mouth, after some hours of speaking—what did they say? Attic?

  The little gadget embedded in my skull explained that there was no such word in Attic.

  Harry Skena shook his head. “We don’t exactly have hospitals.” I could hear the gadget in my ear hesitate before deciding not to translate; it was a pretty smart little box but didn’t have much of a memory. “Since medicine is all done by nanos and robots, we just have spare rooms here and there in every city. If you get sick or hurt, they put you in the nearest room available—usually a private home.”

  “How do people feel about having strangers in their houses?”

  “For us, having a guest is an honor. Not to mention we get a large tax break for it, since most of us feel it’s an absolute duty to take good care of one’s guests, and the state has no right to tax money you need for such a sacred purpose.” Skena was explaining it very slowly, really, as if to a small kid, and then I realized this was something so basic that if I was to get around at all in this culture, I would have to know it. “Those who can’t afford or don’t want a guest room pay a tax that goes to cover medical equipment.”

  “So whose guest was I? And is some form of thanks due to the host?”

  “You were ATN’s guest,” Harry explained. “The people we work for. ATN stands for Allied Timelines for Nondeterminism … and that will get a lot clearer over lunch.”

  Just as he said “lunch,” we came around the bend to a place where the gallery widened into something that looked like a street-corner café. “And here is lunch,” Skena said. “To give you advance warning, our custom is that there’s one dinner served at any given place, and you eat what that is. So if you don’t like lamb, speak up, because that’s what there is today.”

  “Suits me fine,” I said, and we sat.

  We started out with a mixture of fruit and vegetables that didn’t taste very much like anything else I’d ever had; the thin syrup poured over it wasn’t exactly salad dressing but wasn’t exactly not salad dressing either. I was all set to find out what was actually happening, but Ariadne said the place was secure and we could stay as long as we wanted, and that I might as well enjoy the meal before we got down to business.

  I still had not exactly figured out just which of them was the other’s boss; maybe they were both colleagues?

  The not-exactly-a-salad was followed by plain boiled noodles in butter; copying my hosts, I didn’t eat much of them. It seemed to be some kind of ritual. Then the roast lamb came out, and it was pretty much like spicy roast lamb anywhere—that got my undivided attention. At first I figured I was just hungry after missing some meals, but Skena mentioned that the nanos got power directly from blood sugar, so I had a lot of replacing to do anyway.

  That was followed by some more plain boiled noodles with butter, and a little dish of honey and vanilla; following their leads, I sprinkled that on my noodles, too, and ate more of them this time.

  As I ate, I found myself deciding I was going to have to believe in pretty nearly everything they told me, at least at first; it was clear we were in some culture I’d never heard of, from a dozen things. The seasonings on the food were peculiar but consistently peculiar, the way you’d expect; dinner was eaten with spoons, chopsticks, and a little set of tongs; that odd little bit with the noodles, too, was the kind of thing that a society develops naturally without thinking.

  When we’d eaten, I finally swallowed hard and said, “So … um, from what I understand of what you said yesterday before I went to sleep—I would guess that this must be a society descended from Periklean Athens?”

  They glanced at each other, and Skena said, “Well, I told you the data we had indicated he was sharp.”

  “Sort of,” she said, answering my question. “Perikles existed in our timeline, but there were a couple of important figures who actually took over from him in … er—”

  “What you’d call the 430s B.C.,” Skena finished for her. “Look, in your timeline, who won the Peloponnesian War, and how long did it last?”

  Anybody in any branch of history at least knows that. “Sparta. And it lasted about thirty years.”

  “Well, in this timeline Athens won, very early in the war, and all but bloodlessly. And then a couple of people you didn’t have in your timeline—Thukydides the Younger and Kleophrastes were the important ones—created a new Athenian Empire, with a very generous citizenship policy, structured as a sort of federation. That federation went on to win control of the Mediterranean, and then to conquer Asia east to Burma, all of Europe to the Urals, and all of Africa. A couple of thousand years later, they fought a long war with China over control of the New World—and at the end of that, Athens ruled the Earth, which meant one generation later, everyone was Athenian.”

  “Everyone male was Athenian,” Ariadne corrected him.

  Skena blushed a little; I realized this society was obviously just about where mine was in terms of equality of women—not terrible but not yet perfect. At least it was something that I would be able to relate to.

  “And you found a way to visit other timelines?” I asked.

  They both made a funny chopping motion with their hands; then Skena laughed, and said, “Uh, that’s the same thing as shaking our heads. No, definitely not. What happened is that about a hundred years ago—in fact, just when there was a lot of discussion of ending the five years required military service for everyone, on grounds that we hadn’t actually had anyone to fight in centuries—we were hit with a Closer invasion. It was a very near thing, but we beat it back by the skin of our teeth—”

  “The first timeline ever to do that—” Ariadne added, and there was so much pride in her voice I swallowed my questions for a moment.

  “And we got their technology for crossing timelines. So ever since, we’ve been locked in a war between the Closer timelines and ourselves, and our many allies, of course.”

  “Uh, this is still a bit fast for me,” I said. “The Closers are … I don’t know, a bunch of antinudists?”

  Harry Skena laughed, and Ariadne Lao scratched at her ear where the translator must be. “The gadgets don’t deal well with puns,” he said. “No, Closers, like ‘one who closes.’ That’s not what they call themselves. They call themselves Masters. We call them Closers because they close off all but one possibility for every timeline—you could call them very aggressive imperialists; what they try to establish in every timeline is totalitarian rule. Then one small family of Closers moves in and rules the Earth, or the solar system, or sometimes even the solar system plus some of the nearer stars, as the hereditary top of the hierarchy. As near as I can tell every Closer we ever deal with is the slave of some other Closer; presumably somewhere back in their home timeline there’s just one Closer that owns everyone.”

  “And, uh, your side—you said ATN—”

  “It’s a translated expression—the abbreviation for Allied Timelines for Nondeterminism. We’re everybody that is trying to fight off the Closers, ganged up for mutual defense. We have members of all sorts—there’s a couple in which humans never left the Stone Age, there’s one that has starships. The only general principle is that we want to go our own way in our own timelines—though we don’t have many slave societies, or global police states. Those tend to join up with the other side.”

  “I see. So, uh … what were you doing back in my timeline?”

  “Oh, strangely enough, just what I said I was doing. Investigating Blade of the Most Merciful.”

  “Investigating them for what? Are they going to be more important in the future of my timeline?”

  “Not if we can help it,” Skena said, and hi
s voice was grim. “They’re a Closer front. Part of their usual strategy. They destroy all the alternatives between police state and anarchy—because most people will pick the police state—and then take over the police state. They get you to destroy your own freedom and then they just knock over the local masters and take over the operation themselves.”

  I nodded slowly. “So what were you supposed to do to them?”

  Skena shrugged. “Timelines are sticky. They tend to fall back into each other one way or another. If you shoot somebody in one, the world where he exists and the world where he doesn’t will tend to drift back together and merge. That’s part of why there’s so much contradictory data in history, you know. You said you were in art history at Yale—”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “But obviously you knew it anyway. So you had looked up things about me before coming to my office? What are you up to?”

  Ariadne seemed to be fighting down a smile. “I do believe you said he was sharp.”

  Skena seemed to have the beginnings of a blush forming, but then he shrugged and said, “Well, it’s like this, then. You were on my list of people to look up eventually, and I’d been keeping a tab or two on you for some years. Then when it turned out that your family was targeted by Blade … well, it was the kind of thing that sometimes falls into place.”

  “How did I get on your list?”

  He shrugged. “In timelines who join the Alliance, sometimes we find records of our agents. You’ve turned up in several. That means we must have recruited you at one time or another, or that you got involved in this. Always assuming that you are the Mark Strang—it’s always possible that some other version of yourself is the one who ends up working for us.”

  “So if you offer me a job—”

  “Well, that’s just it,” Skena said. “I was playing a hunch when I came to your office. I had just gotten a threatening visit from Blade of the Most Merciful. I decided I had better run for it while the running was good. And since you were on my list for eventual investigation and contact, and you work as a bodyguard—”