“Of course I can’t land on a nice beach,” he muttered to himself. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in water that cold.”
The girl assumed he was talking to a second deity only he could see. From the forest’s edge, she watched as the being sat, his back to her, and continued speaking in his funny foreign tongue.
“At least I didn’t appear underground. I guess I have that to be thankful for.” And then, looking at the rocks that jutted out from the land, imagining what his body would look like if he had fallen a few hundred feet to the west, added, “I guess the water wasn’t so bad.”
The girl, having completely forgotten her berries, watched in fascination as the god spoke. As much as she looked for a second being, she couldn’t find one, and she couldn’t tell if the god was talking to himself the way some of the eccentric village elders did or if he could see things she couldn’t. After a minute, the god stood up and looked around at his surroundings. She had no idea deities would pretend to shiver so much!
The being was still muttering to himself as he surveyed the bay, the beach, and the forest. Nothing but water and trees for as far as he could see. He immediately fell silent when he saw her. The deity’s eyes narrowed, seeing her outline, then widened when he realized she was a living person. The girl scrunched herself tighter against the tree as if this would make her disappear or at least make her less interesting to a being powerful enough to appear from the heavens. She had heard many times how capricious and petty the gods could be, and the last thing she wanted was for one of them to turn her into a muskrat just for laughs.
“Hello,” the god said, letting the word stretch for seconds.
She saw how the thing in front of her smiled as it spoke, as if it had said something soothing, but to her the word was just gibberish. She thought to repeat the word back to him, but her elders had never told her whether or not she was allowed to speak directly to the gods. And even if she could, she had no idea if ‘Hello’ meant “I am going to kill you,” or “Don’t say a word unless you want to be turned into a muskrat.” Wasn’t it rude, though, she thought, to stare and say nothing?
And so she did the only thing a six-year-old girl in her situation could think to do. She ran. Little berries fell out of her basket as she darted back toward her village.
The deity watched the girl run. As she disappeared from sight, leaving him alone, he muttered “Crap.”
Then he sat down on the rocks again, this time to get his bearings, and began to think of what he should do next.
The village that the girl was running toward was not visible, but the billows of smoke rising in the air, gentle dark grey puffs, let him know a collection of huts was positioned a few miles off. He did not try to chase the girl down and tell her he meant no harm. He could tell she hadn’t understood the simple greeting. Trying to tell her anything more complicated would only confuse and scare her even more than she already was.
At least this way, when she told the village leaders what she had seen and they asked why she was running, she would have to admit she had been scared for no real reason. They would surely ask if the visitor had tried to harm her. Unless she was a liar, she would have to say no. A group of men would be dispatched to investigate the area where the light had illuminated the sky and the spot where the girl had seen a man fall into the water and then swim to shore. Maybe these men would think the girl was just trying to play a trick on them with her fantastic story. Or maybe they too had seen the burst of light and might believe something miraculous was taking place.
That was why he didn’t run after her. It was also why he didn’t run into the trees to hide from them. They could probably track him through the forest anyway. Without any other option he could think of, he found a large rock and sat, waiting for them.
The time traveler did not fear the native people the way many from his time were taught to fear them. There were horror stories that natives used to ambush random settlers and scalp them. The dead men’s wives, if they weren’t also scalped, would be abducted and married off to others in the tribe. But for the most part, stories of barbarians in the centuries prior to the Tyranny were just one of the ways the Tyranny tried to make its own actions seem more civilized.
Their warfare was acceptable because, rather than riding horseback upon a helpless farmer, they decimated entire cities and countries using remote controlled flying robots. Their killings were acts of superior intellect rather than mere senseless barbarism because they used computers to analyze threats and kill people from thousands of miles away. And even when the Tyranny’s security services blasted away men, women, old and young alike, in their own homes or on crowded streets, this was still better than preying on settlers unlucky enough to be traveling in small numbers. The Tyranny committed their crimes against everyone equally. Compared to bloodthirsty natives, the Tyranny was gentlemanly.
What the time traveler knew, though, what the others like him also understood, was that most natives were the exact opposite of the way the Tyranny described them. They weren’t eager to slaughter settlers. In fact, they were often peaceful to a fault. They trusted visitors when they shouldn’t. They forgave when they shouldn’t. And they refused to fight when they should.
That was why the time traveler sat on the rock with his burlap bag of supplies intended to hold him over until he found signs of civilization. Although he could no longer see the girl as she made her way back to her village, and wouldn’t be able to see the men approaching until they were within a quarter mile of him, he was confident they would treat him as a guest—not as an enemy.
In the meantime, he took in his surroundings. There were no AeroCams overhead. It was the first time, since before he had started middle school, that he saw a sky free of the flying cameras, the largest of which were equipped with rockets to destroy any perceived threat, the smaller ones able to sneak between homes. He remembered how, at sixteen, playing left field for the junior varsity team, he had looked up at the sky to catch a pop–up and had seen more AeroCams above him than birds. One of them had been flying in the same direction as the ball and, before he realized his mistake, the baseball dropped to the ground. The thing he had momentarily thought was the ball continued to zoom around, recording the identities of everyone in the bleachers.
The second thing he noticed was that his ears were ringing. Initially, he blamed this on the tremendous noise and vibrations of the machine that had sent him into the past. Even without knowing exactly when he was in history, he could tell from his surroundings that he was looking at the world at least two hundred years before his own time.
To get here, he and nine other men who wanted to change history and prevent the Tyranny from arising, had lined up in a dank cellar and allowed themselves to be enveloped by the energy of an antimatter machine. As pure as the light had been that engulfed them, somehow it hadn’t made him squint the way the sun always did. But the noise that accompanied the light had made him feel like he was standing directly behind a jumbo jet. Toward the end, right before he blinked and found himself no longer standing on concrete but falling from the sky, he hadn’t been able to hear anything the man next to him had been saying.
That kind of intense humming noise had to cause permanent hearing damage. He could hear the birds chirping, though. And he had been able to hear the girl’s feet kicking up rocks as she ran away. Even the water, calm as it was during low tide, was audible. He began to realize the odd buzzing in his ears wasn’t from the machine’s reverberations at all, but from the relative silence of a sky free of AeroCams.
The latest models were touted as noiseless, but that was only in comparison to other flying machines the Tyranny employed. None of the Tyranny’s words actually meant what they were supposed to. Lower taxes didn’t mean people paid less; it meant taxes weren’t raised. A law passed to ensure the people’s safety actually ensured the Tyranny was more enrooted in their lives. And a “noiseless” killing machine wasn’t silent; it was only quieter than the previous killi
ng machine.
Anyone who listened carefully would still hear a soft humming that became more obvious the closer the AeroCam got. No one paid attention to the noise produced by just one AeroCam. But the Tyranny didn’t use only one of the flying machines. They used millions. Hundreds flew over every neighborhood. Thousands over every city. Almost anywhere people could go, the Tyranny had flying robots recording their every movement. The result of so many machines filling the skies was a dull hum that people became oblivious to. But once it was gone, as it was now, the difference was remarkable.
The time traveler was reminded of the apartment he had lived in just after college. It was one city block away from a major highway. At night, he watched streams of headlights blur into one elongated glow as thousands of cars crept home for the evening. After a couple weeks, he had forgotten that the massive amount of vehicles produced constant noise. Only when visitors came over and commented on the sound of traffic did he remember it was still there. But then, a year later, he moved from the city to the suburbs, to a quiet house, and his ears wouldn’t stop ringing. The traffic was gone, but in its place was a ringing that reminded him of the damage that thousands of cars could cause to someone’s hearing. So it was with the AeroCams.
He laughed then, not only because he was someplace where the AeroCams weren’t, but because the trip had actually worked. Knowing the risks of what he was doing, he had been fully prepared to vanish from his own time and immediately die. Such was the nature of trying to go back in time when the technology couldn’t guarantee when the traveler would appear, and because of that, couldn’t guarantee where they would appear. While time travel was now possible, the precision of the journey was by no means scientific. That is to say, it wasn’t measureable and repeatable. There was no telling how far someone would be sent back in time.
He knew he would appear somewhere along the 44N latitude, but other than that, he had no say in whether he went back ten years in time or ten thousand years. Without knowing the exact moment he would appear, guaranteed to a fraction of a second, he also had no control over whether he entered this new time over land, underground, in the middle of the ocean, or anywhere in between. With the earth revolving, and with time travel being dependent on a dominant gravitational force, Earth’s core, the only thing the scientists knew for sure was that the time travelers would appear somewhere along the same latitude they had departed from, at the exact same height from sea level as they had departed from. This meant that if he appeared where the land was higher than one hundred and fifty feet in elevation, he would appear under the earth and immediately die. If he appeared over the water, well, he just experienced what would happen then.
“Where the hell am I?” he wondered aloud.
Looking around him, he narrowed down the options of where he could possibly be. The sun was rising from the direction of the water, the east, so he knew he was either on the shore of the Great Lakes, Canada, the Adriatic Sea, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, or the Pacific Ocean. From the brief glimpse he had of the girl before she ran away, her slight cheeks and pitch-black hair, he guessed it was one of the first two possibilities.
With at least a decent idea of where he was in the world, he then muttered, “When the hell am I?”
There were no AeroCams in the sky, so no matter where he was, he knew he had been sent back in time before the Tyranny existed. But there were also no airplanes in the sky, no telephone poles, no boats off the coast, no lighthouses to warn ships of the approaching rocks. The only signs of human life he had seen were the girl and the smoke from distant campfires. Assuming he had appeared at either the Great Lakes or the Canadian coast, he would had to have been sent back well before the twentieth century in order to find such a technologically primitive group of people living near the coast. But while he couldn’t see if the villagers were in huts or cabins, he also didn’t see a flag raised above the town. Without a French flag hoisted above the treetops, it was safe to assume he had appeared before Europeans had come across the ocean. If the natives who were no doubt on their way to greet him hadn’t yet been converted to Catholicism, it meant he had not only appeared before the twentieth century, he was sometime before the sixteenth century.
He had known the risks involved in trying to travel back in time to prevent the Tyranny. If the security services had found out about the plan, they would have aimed their assault blasters at the row of men and killed everyone on the spot. If he had escaped the Tyranny but reappeared in the wrong location, he might have treaded water in the middle of the ocean until he drowned, fallen to his death, or appeared underground and been smothered. And if he got sent too far back in time, as it was starting to seem, he would spend the rest of his life apart from his wife and son without the chance of changing the future for them.
He let his face fall into his palms and closed his eyes. How many friends had he watched get dragged away by the Tyranny to be found the next day with a blaster hole in the back of their head? How many people had he seen one day and then never seen again, no indication if they were still alive? How many people had he seen live with the constant fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, drawing the Tyranny’s attention, and suffering the consequences? How could he allow his son to grow up in such a world?
When people only knew one way of living, a life in which the Tyranny listened to everything you said and watched everything you did, people would eventually forget a better way of life was possible. He got sick to his stomach any time he thought of someone being born after the Tyranny was formed, thinking it was normal to have cameras watching everything they did, having guards at checkpoints controlling where they could go and where they couldn’t, watching television footage of the Tyranny’s constant stream of wars.
That wasn’t the world he wanted his boy to live in, and so he had volunteered, along with nine other men, to stand against a stone wall and vanish into history. Now he was here. Wherever, and whenever, here was.
Already, he saw a group of five men dressed in heavy clothes and carrying bows, running along the coastline toward him. He had no idea what tribe they belonged to or whether they had seen people outside their own society before. It didn’t matter, though; five natives, each with a weapon, was already an improvement over having just one of the Tyranny’s men pointing an assault blaster at his son or his wife.
4 – O Marks The Spot, Not X
Date: 1795
During the boat ride, the boys didn’t talk about things like the Super Bowl or the new hit song on the radio because those things didn’t exist yet. For them, life was limited to what happened around their town. Crop yields made for a popular discussion topic. The latest news of a wolf sneaking onto a farm and killing some sheep was the source of much gossip. The boys didn’t talk about what they wanted to be when they grew up, either. In Nova Scotia at the end of the eighteenth century, boys either took up a trade found in town, or became farmers or fishermen. There were few other possibilities.
It wouldn’t be until the industrial age took hold of the land that people would begin to see they could aim for lives beyond their parents’ limited horizons. A hundred years later, boys in a similar canoe might ask each other if they had seen the new sport where a pitcher tried to throw a ball past a man who was trying to hit it with a stick. Or they might discuss all the magical advances that were supposedly taking place in New York City. Those things were a long way off, though.
And yet, some topics are timeless, and so the boys somehow sounded and acted much like teenagers from any other time.
Daniel nudged John, who was sitting beside him in the back of the canoe, and said, “I heard Sarah Cunningham let Trevor Blake hold her hand the other day.”
Anthony and Samuel, the two boys in the front of the canoe, both saw their friend’s shoulders tense up.
“Is that news?” Anthony said, leaning forward and patting John’s shoulder. “I thought everyone knew Sarah let all the boys hold her hand.”
John turned and, with a wide gr
in, said, “Shut up, guys. Sarah doesn’t let anyone hold her hand.”
Poor John, Daniel thought. The kid smiled even when his heart was breaking. Daniel knew that most of the time his friend smiled like that he actually wanted to cry instead of laugh. And yet the stupid grin always showed itself. He had smiled when his father came home from the tavern drunk. He had smiled when his father beat him with a belt. And he smiled now when he heard his first love didn’t seem to care how many different boys in town held her hand.
Anthony leaned forward and patted his friend’s shoulder a second time. “It’s okay, John,” he said. “You deserve better anyways.”
But John didn’t say anything, only offered that dumb smile, and Daniel knew to let the subject drop. “Choppy waters today,” he said. “Let’s not go out too far from shore.”
They ended up picking one of the larger islands for their exploration, one that was fairly close to the mainland yet further south than they normally traveled. The island appeared even larger than it actually was because it was surrounded by a collection of islands that were nothing more than large piles of rocks sticking out of the water. It was certainly no Australia or Japan or any of the other exotic places they learned about in school. In fact, even though this was one of the larger islands in the area, the boys could easily jog around its entire one hundred and forty acres by lunchtime if they so desired. And with its highest point being just over thirty feet above sea level, there were no mountains to conquer, no games of king-of-the-hill to engage in until one of the boys had torn trousers or a bloody nose.
Even an island of that size could offer a day’s worth of adventure for the four boys, however. They could go anywhere they wanted, say and do anything they pleased. Daniel didn’t really think they would find a stranded beauty, monsters, or a chest of gold, but if they were lucky they might be able to find the skeleton of someone who had washed ashore after one of the various vessels hit the rocks and gave up its cargo and crew to the ocean.
The Theta Prophecy Page 2
