Jefferson scowled. “Perhaps some Madeira,” he said. “If you have it.”
Sutherland nodded to her secretary, who stared for a moment in incomprehension, then hurried off. “How was the flight?” Sutherland asked.
“Your engines are most impressive,” Jefferson said, “as you well know.” Rice saw the subtle trembling of the man’s hands; he hadn’t taken well to jet flight. “I only wish your political sensitivities were as advanced.”
“You know I can’t speak for my employers,” Sutherland said. “For myself, I deeply regret the darker aspects of our operations. Florida will be missed.”
Irritated, Rice leaned forward. “You’re not really here to discuss sen-sibilities, are you?”
“Freedom, sir,” Jefferson said. “Freedom is the issue.” The secretary returned with a dust-caked bottle of sherry and a stack of clear plastic cups. Jefferson, his hands visibly shaking now, poured a glass and tossed it back. Color returned to his face. He said, “You made certain promises when we joined forces. You guaranteed us liberty and equality and the freedom to pursue our own happiness. Instead we find your machinery on all sides, your cheap manufactured goods seducing the people of our great country, our minerals and works of art disappearing into your fortresses, never to reappear!” The last line brought Jefferson to his feet.
Sutherland shrank back into her chair. “The common good requires a certain period of—uh, adjustment—”
“Oh, come on, Tom,” Rice broke in. “We didn’t ‘join forces,’ that’s a lot of crap. We kicked the Brits out and you in, and you had damn-all to do with it. Second, if we drill for oil and carry off a few paintings, it doesn’t have a goddamned thing to do with your liberty. We don’t care. Do whatever you like, just stay out of our way. Right? If we wanted a lot of back talk we could have left the damn British in power.”
Jefferson sat down. Sutherland meekly poured him another glass, which he drank off at once. “I cannot understand you,” he said. “You claim you come from the future, yet you seem bent on destroying your own past.”
“But we’re not,” Rice said. “It’s this way. History is like a tree, okay? When you go back and mess with the past, another branch of history splits off from the main trunk. Well, this world is just one of those branches.”
“So,” Jefferson said. “This world—my world—does not lead to your future.”
“Right,” Rice said.
“Leaving you free to rape and pillage here at will! While your own world is untouched and secure!” Jefferson was on his feet again. “I find the idea monstrous beyond belief, intolerable! How can you be party to such despotism? Have you no human feelings?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Rice said. “Of course we do. What about the radios and the magazines and the medicine we hand out? Personally I think you’ve got a lot of nerve, coming in here with your smallpox scars and your unwashed shirt and all those slaves of yours back home, lecturing us on humanity.”
“Rice?” Sutherland said.
Rice locked eyes with Jefferson. Slowly, Jefferson sat down. “Look,” Rice said, relenting. “We don’t mean to be unreasonable. Maybe things aren’t working out just the way you pictured them, but hey, that’s life, you know? What do you want, really? Cars? Movies? Telephones? Birth control? Just say the word and they’re yours.”
Jefferson pressed his thumbs into the corners of his eyes. “Your words mean nothing to me, sir. I only want . . . I want only to return to my home. To Monticello. And as soon as possible.”
“Is it one of your migraines, Mr. President?” Sutherland asked. “I had these made up for you.” She pushed a vial of pills across the table toward him.
“What are these?”
Sutherland shrugged. “You’ll feel better.”
After Jefferson left, Rice half expected a reprimand. Instead, Sutherland said, “You seem to have a tremendous faith in the project.”
“Oh, cheer up,” Rice said, “You’ve been spending too much time with these politicals. Believe me, this is a simple time, with simple people. Sure, Jefferson was a little ticked off, but he’ll come around. Relax!”
RICE FOUND MOZART clearing tables in the main dining hall of the Hohensalzburg Castle. In his faded jeans, camo jacket, and mirrored sunglasses, he might almost have passed for a teenager from Rice’s time.
“Wolfgang!” Rice called to him. “How’s the new job?”
Mozart set a stack of dishes aside and ran his hands over his short-cropped hair. “Wolf,” he said. “Call me Wolf, okay? Sounds more . . . modern, you know? But yes, I really want to thank you for everything you have done for me. The tapes, the history books, this job—it is so wonderful just to be around here.”
His English, Rice noticed, had improved remarkably in the last three weeks. “You still living in the city?”
“Yes, but I have my own place now. You are coming to the gig tonight?”
“Sure,” Rice said. “Why don’t you finish up around here, I’ll go change, and then we can go out for some sachertorte, okay? We’ll make a night of it.”
Rice dressed carefully, wearing mesh body armor under his velvet coat and knee britches. He crammed his pockets with giveaway consumer goods, then met Mozart by a rear door.
Security had been stepped up around the castle, and floodlights swept the sky. Rice sensed a new tension in the festive abandon of the crowds downtown.
Like everyone else from his time, he towered over the locals; even incognito he felt dangerously conspicuous.
Within the club Rice faded into the darkness and relaxed. The place had been converted from the lower half of some young aristo’s town house; protruding bricks still marked the lines of the old walls. The patrons were locals, mostly, dressed in any Realtime garments they could scavenge. Rice even saw one kid wearing a pair of beige silk panties on his head.
Mozart took the stage. Minuetlike guitar arpeggios screamed over sequenced choral motifs. Stacks of amps blasted synthesizer riffs lifted from a tape of K-Tel pop hits. The howling audience showered Mozart with confetti stripped from the club’s hand-painted wallpaper.
Afterward Mozart smoked a joint of Turkish hash and asked Rice about the future.
“Mine, you mean?” Rice said. “You wouldn’t believe it. Six billion people, and nobody has to work if they don’t want to. Five-hundred-channel TV in every house. Cars, helicopters, clothes that would knock your eyes out. Plenty of easy sex. You want music? You could have your own recording studio. It’d make your gear on stage look like a goddamned clavichord.”
“Really? I would give anything to see that. I can’t understand why you would leave.”
Rice shrugged. “So I’m giving up maybe fifteen years. When I get back, it’s the best of everything. Anything I want.”
“Fifteen years?”
“Yeah. You gotta understand how the portal works. Right now it’s as big around as you are tall, just big enough for a phone cable and a pipeline full of oil, maybe the odd bag of mail, heading for Realtime. To make it any bigger, like to move people or equipment through, is expensive as hell. So expensive they only do it twice, at the beginning and the end of the project. So, yeah, I guess we’re stuck here.”
Rice coughed harshly and drank off his glass. That Ottoman Empire hash had untied his mental shoelaces. Here he was opening up to Mozart, making the kid want to emigrate, and there was no way in hell Rice could get him a Green Card. Not with all the millions that wanted a free ride into the future—billions, if you counted the other projects, like the Roman Empire or New Kingdom Egypt.
“But I’m really glad to be here,” Rice said. “It’s like . . . like shuffling the deck of history. You never know what’ll come up next.” Rice passed the joint to one of Mozart’s groupies, Antonia something-or-other. “This is a great time to be alive. Look at you. You’re doing okay, aren’t you?” He leaned across the table, in the grip of a sudden sincerity. “I mean, it’s okay, right? It’s not like you hate all of us for fucking up your world or an
ything?”
“Are you making a joke? You are looking at the hero of Salzburg. In fact, your Mr. Parker is supposed to make a tape of my last set tonight. Soon all of Europe will know of me!” Someone shouted at Mozart, in German, from across the club. Mozart glanced up and gestured cryptically. “Be cool, man.” He turned back to Rice. “You can see that I am doing fine.”
“Sutherland, she worries about stuff like all those symphonies you’re never going to write.”
“Bullshit! I don’t want to write symphonies. I can listen to them any time I want! Who is this Sutherland? Is she your girlfriend?”
“No. She goes for the locals. Danton, Robespierre, like that. How about you? You got anybody?”
“Nobody special. Not since I was a kid.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Well, when I was about six I was at Maria Theresa’s court. I used to play with her daughter—Maria Antonia. Marie Antoinette she calls herself now. The most beautiful girl of the age. We used to play duets. We made a joke that we would be married, but she went off to France with that swine, Louis.”
“Goddamn,” Rice said. “This is really amazing. You know, she’s practically a legend where I come from. They cut her head off in the French Revolution for throwing too many parties.”
“No they didn’t . . .”
“That was our French Revolution,” Rice said. “Yours was a lot less messy.”
“You should go see her, if you’re that interested. Surely she owes you a favor for saving her life.”
Before Rice could answer, Parker arrived at their table, surrounded by ex-ladies-in-waiting in spandex capris and sequined tube tops. “Hey, Rice,” Parker shouted, serenely anachronistic in a glitter T-shirt and black leather jeans. “Where did you get those unhip threads? Come on, let’s party!”
Rice watched as the girls crowded around the table and gnawed the corks out of a crate of champagne. As short, fat, and repulsive as Parker might be, they would gladly knife one another for a chance to sleep in his clean sheets and raid his medicine cabinet.
“No, thanks,” Rice said, untangling himself from the miles of wire connected to Parker’s recording gear.
The image of Marie Antoinette had seized him and would not let go.
RICE SAT NAKED on the edge of the canopied bed, shivering a little in the air conditioning. Past the jutting window unit, through clouded panes of eighteenth-century glass, he saw a lush, green landscape sprinkled with tiny waterfalls.
At ground level, a garden crew of former aristos in blue-denim overalls trimmed weeds under the bored supervision of a peasant guard. The guard, clothed head to foot in camouflage except for a tricolor cockade on his fatigue cap, chewed gum and toyed with the strap of his cheap plastic machine gun. The gardens of Petit Trianon, like Versailles itself, were treasures deserving the best of care. They belonged to the Nation, since they were too large to be crammed through a time portal.
Marie Antoinette sprawled across the bed’s expanse of pink satin, wearing a scrap of black-lace underwear and leafing through an issue of Vogue. The bedroom’s walls were crowded with Boucher canvases: acres of pert silky rumps, pink haunches, knowingly pursed lips. Rice looked dazedly from the portrait of Louise O’Morphy, kittenishly sprawled on a divan, to the sleek, creamy expanse of Toinette’s back and thighs. He took a deep, exhausted breath. “Man,” he said, “that guy could really paint.”
Toinette cracked off a square of Hershey’s chocolate and pointed to the magazine. “I want the leather bikini,” she said. “Always, when I am a girl, my goddamn mother, she keep me in the goddamn corsets. She think my what-you-call, my shoulder blade sticks out too much.”
Rice leaned back across her solid thighs and patted her bottom reassuringly. He felt wonderfully stupid; a week and a half of obsessive carnality had reduced him to a euphoric animal. “Forget your mother, baby. You’re with me now. You want ze goddamn leather bikini, I get it for you.”
Toinette licked chocolate from her fingertips. “Tomorrow we go out to the cottage, okay, man? We dress up like the peasants and make love in the hedges like noble savages.”
Rice hesitated. His weekend furlough to Paris had stretched into a week and a half; by now security would be looking for him. To hell with them, he thought. “Great,” he said. “I’ll phone us up a picnic lunch. Foie gras and truffles, maybe some terrapin—”
Toinette pouted. “I want the modern food. The pizza and burritos and the chicken fried.” When Rice shrugged, she threw her arms around his neck. “You love me, Rice?”
“Love you? Baby, I love the very idea of you.” He was drunk on history out of control, careening under him like some great black motorcycle of the imagination. When he thought of Paris, take-out quiche-to-go stores springing up where guillotines might have been, a six-year-old Napoleon munching Dubble Bubble in Corsica, he felt like the archangel Michael on speed.
Megalomania, he knew, was an occupational hazard. But he’d get back to work soon enough, in just a few more days. . . .
The phone rang. Rice burrowed into a plush house robe formerly owned by Louis XVI. Louis wouldn’t mind; he was now a happily divorced locksmith in Nice.
Mozart’s face appeared on the phone’s tiny screen. “Hey, man, where are you?”
“France,” Rice said vaguely. “What’s up?”
“Trouble, man. Sutherland flipped out, and they’ve got her sedated. At least six key people have gone over the hill, counting you.” Mozart’s voice had only the faintest trace of accent left.
“Hey, I’m not over the hill. I’ll be back in just a couple days. We’ve got—what, thirty other people in Northern Europe? If you’re worried about the quotas—”
“Fuck the quotas. This is serious. There’s uprisings. Comanches raising hell on the rigs in Texas. Labor strikes in London and Vienna. Realtime is pissed. They’re talking about pulling us out.”
“What?” Now he was alarmed.
“Yeah. Word came down the line today. They say you guys let this whole operation get sloppy. Too much contamination, too much fraternization. Sutherland made a lot of trouble with the locals before she got found out. She was organizing the Masonistas for some kind of passive resistance and God knows what else.”
“Shit.” The fucking politicals had screwed it up again. It wasn’t enough that he’d busted ass getting the plant up and on line; now he had to clean up after Sutherland. He glared at Mozart. “Speaking of fraternization, what’s all this we stuff? What the hell are you doing calling me?”
Mozart paled. “Just trying to help. I got a job in communications now.”
“That takes a Green Card. Where the hell did you get that?”
“Uh, listen, man, I got to go. Get back here, will you? We need you.” Mozart’s eyes flickered, looking past Rice’s shoulder. “You can bring your little time-bunny along if you want. But hurry.”
“I . . . oh, shit, okay,” Rice said.
RICE’S HOVERCAR huffed along at a steady 80 kph, blasting clouds of dust from the deeply rutted highway. They were near the Bavarian border. Ragged Alps jutted into the sky over radiant green meadows, tiny picturesque farmhouses, and clear, vivid streams of melted snow.
They’d just had their first argument. Toinette had asked for a Green Card, and Rice had told her he couldn’t do it. He offered her a Gray Card instead, that would get her from one branch of time to another without letting her visit Realtime. He knew he’d be reassigned if the project pulled out, and he wanted to take her with him. He wanted to do the decent thing, not leave her behind in a world without Hersheys and Vogues.
But she wasn’t having any of it. After a few kilometers of weighty silence she started to squirm. “I have to pee,” she said finally. “Pull over by the goddamn trees.”
“Okay,” Rice said. “Okay.”
He cut the fans and whirred to a stop. A herd of brindled cattle spooked off with a clank of cowbells. The road was deserted.
Rice got out and stretched, watching Toinette climb a
wooden stile and walk toward a stand of trees.
“What’s the deal?” Rice yelled. “There’s nobody around. Get on with it!”
A dozen men burst up from the cover of a ditch and rushed him. In an instant they’d surrounded him, leveling flintlock pistols. They wore tricornes and wigs and lace-cuffed highwayman’s coats; black domino masks hid their faces. “What the fuck is this?” Rice asked, amazed. “Mardi Gras?”
The leader ripped off his mask and bowed ironically. His handsome Teutonic features were powdered, his lips rouged. “I am Count Axel Ferson. Servant, sir.”
Rice knew the name; Ferson had been Toinette’s lover before the Revolution. “Look, Count, maybe you’re a little upset about Toinette, but I’m sure we can make a deal. Wouldn’t you really rather have a color TV?”
“Spare us your satanic blandishments, sir!” Ferson roared. “I would not soil my hands on the collaborationist cow. We are the Freemason Liberation Front!”
“Christ,” Rice said. “You can’t possibly be serious. Are you taking on the project with these popguns?”
“We are aware of your advantage in armaments, sir. This is why we have made you our hostage.” He spoke to the others in German. They tied Rice’s hands and hustled him into the back of a horse-drawn wagon that had clopped out of the woods.
“Can’t we at least take the car?” Rice asked. Glancing back, he saw Toinette sitting dejectedly in the road by the hovercraft.
“We reject your machines,” Ferson said. “They are one more facet of your godlessness. Soon we will drive you back to hell, from whence you came!”
“With what? Broomsticks?” Rice sat up in the back of the wagon, ignoring the stink of manure and rotting hay. “Don’t mistake our kindness for weakness. If they send the Gray Card Army through that portal, there won’t be enough left of you to fill an ashtray.”
“We are prepared to sacrifice! Each day thousands flock to our worldwide movement, under the banner of the All-Seeing Eye! We shall reclaim our destiny! The destiny you have stolen from us!”
The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century Page 38
