Time Loves a Hero
Page 1
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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF ALLEN STEELE
“An author with the potential to revitalize the Heinlein tradition.” —Booklist
“The best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade.” —John Varley, author of Slow Apocalypse
“One of the hottest new writers of hard SF on the scene today.” —Asimov’s Science Fiction
“No question, Steele can tell a story.” —OtherRealms
“The master of science-fiction intrigue.” —The Washington Post
“Allen Steele is among the best.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Steele writes with a spirit of exuberant, even exalted, optimism about our future in space.… Intelligent, literate, and ingenious.” —Booklist
“[Steele’s writing is] highly recommended.” —Library Journal
“A leading young writer of hard science fiction.” —Science Fiction Weekly
Orbital Decay
Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel
“Stunning.” —Chicago Sun-Times
“[Steele is] the master of science-fiction intrigue.” —The Washington Post
“Brings the thrill back to realistic space exploration. It reads like a mainstream novel written in 2016 A.D.” —The New York Review of Science Fiction
“A damned good book; lightning on the high frontier. I got a sense throughout that this was how it would really be.” —Jack McDevitt, author of Cauldron
“An ambitious science fiction thriller … skillfully plotted and written with gusto.” —Publishers Weekly
“A splendidly executed novel of working-class stiffs in space.” —Locus
“Reads like golden-age Heinlein.” —Gregory Benford, author of Beyond Infinity
“Readers won’t be disappointed. This is the kind of hard, gritty SF they haven’t been getting enough of.” —Rave Reviews
The Tranquillity Alternative
“A high-tech thriller set against the backdrop of an alternative space program. Allen Steele has created a novel that is at once action-packed, poignant, and thought provoking. His best novel to date.” —Kevin J. Anderson, bestselling author of the Jedi Academy Trilogy
“Science fiction with its rivets showing as only Steele can deliver it. This one is another winner.” —Jack McDevitt, author of The Engines of God
“With The Tranquillity Alternative, Allen Steele warns us of the bitter harvest reaped by intolerance, and of the losses incurred by us all when the humanity of colleagues and friends is willfully ignored.” —Nicola Griffith, author of Ammonite
Labyrinth of Night
“Unanswered questions, high-tech, hard-science SF adventure, and action—how can you fail to enjoy this one?” —Analog Science Fiction and Fact
The Jericho Iteration
“Allen Steele is the best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade. In The Jericho Iteration he comes down to a near-future Earth and proves he can handle a darker, scarier setting as well as his delightful planetary adventures. I couldn’t put it down.” —John Varley, author of Slow Apocalypse
Rude Astronauts
“A portrait of a writer who lives and breathes the dreams of science fiction.” —Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Clarke County, Space
“Lively … engaging.” —Locus
“A really gripping tale … This stuff is what I love the most about science fiction!” —The Texas SF Inquirer
Lunar Descent
“A well-balanced blend of hard science, adventure, and thoughtful extrapolation.” —Science Fiction Chronicle
“A triumph of the individual human spirit … excellent.” —Starlog
Time Loves a Hero
“Not only a story about time traveling and multiple worlds, but also a look at how science fiction inspired scientific endeavors … [Time Loves a Hero] demonstrates Steele’s growth as a writer.” —Steven Silver’s Reviews
Oceanspace
“Steele’s descriptions of the ocean depths and the unknown possibilities down there are first rate.” —The Denver Post
“Steele’s account of the undersea research facility that is the real star of this book is so thorough you’d think he had visited the place. The plot is complex and the characters real. There aren’t many people writing fiction grounded in realistic scientific explanation. Allen Steele is among the best.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“The closest thing in years to [Arthur C.] Clarke’s The Deep Range. Steele has done his technical homework thoroughly and he writes with an eye to pacing and dry wit. Hard SF adventure doesn’t get a whole lot better than this.” —Booklist
Time Loves a Hero
Allen Steele
for Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams
CONTENTS
Introduction
Prologue
PART 1
Monday Times Three
PART 2
“… Where Angels Fear to Tread”
PART 3
Free Will
Acknowledgments
Sources
About the Author
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
—ALEXANDER POPE
Introduction
The first things that need be said about this novel, of course, are that it has been previously published under another title, Chronospace, and that it had an even earlier incarnation as a novella, “‘… Where Angels Fear to Tread.’” The whys and wherefores of these changes have a lot to do with the book’s origins.
I gained the essential idea for this story way back in high school, when I had a vision of a time traveler trying to escape the Hindenburg as it went down in flames. It took a long while, though, to develop a story suitable for this scene. That didn’t occur until many years later while I was living in St. Louis, when I heard Washington University physics professor Matt Visser deliver a lecture on the possibility of time travel. His remarks informed me of a plausible way to deal with time travel, a subject about which I’d become rather skeptical. Shortly after that, I read Hindenburg: An Illustrated History by Rick Archbold, a book that made me remember my adolescent fantasy of a visitor from the future struggling to escape the burning airship. That was when I decided to finally write this particular tale.
The story was originally intended to be a novel, and its title was always supposed to be Time Loves a Hero. Little Feat fans will immediately recognize this as one of the group’s best albums; if you listen to its eponymous song, you’ll see how it suits the novel perfectly (“Seein’ ain’t always believin’” is a recurring theme here). In order to properly research this novel, though, I needed to travel to Frankfurt, the city from which the Hindenburg departed on its final flight. I began making plans for the trip, but in 1997 my wife and I decided to move back to New England, so the funds I’d put aside to travel to Germany were spent instead on relocating to Massachusetts.
I didn’t want to utterly abandon the story, so I cut the first and third parts of the novel that I’d mentally outlined and wrote the second part as a novella that I sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction. “‘… Where Angels Fear to Tread’” was published in the October/November 1997 issue, which came out shortly after I unpacked my last box in my new home.
Much to my surprise, the novella was a big hit. The following year it won the Hugo Award and the annual readers’ awards from Asimov’s and Science Fiction Chronicle, and was also nominated for the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and Seiun Awards. Since then it has gone on to be translated and reprinted in Japan, Italy, Poland, and the Cz
ech Republic. By then, I’d saved enough money again to undertake that long-delayed research trip. Buoyed by the novella’s success, Linda and I spent a week in Frankfurt, where I visited the locales described in the first part of this novel.
I had a lot of fun writing this book. Gregory Benford, my good friend and colleague, has been a literary mentor from the beginning of my career, when he supplied a lovely blurb to my first novel, Orbital Decay. I put him in this book, albeit in a sly fashion (I’m not giving away the plot by saying how). The scenes in Washington, DC, the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, and Smithville, Tennessee, are all drawn from places where I’ve lived (although the general store near Center Hill Lake has, regretfully, been torn down). And the names of most of the main characters are those of old friends … including Zack, my dog who’d curl up on the office floor beside my desk to keep me company while I wrote.
When the novel was completed and turned in, though, my editor at Ace decided that she didn’t like the title. Over my objections, she changed it to Chronospace, a term I’d invented in this novel to describe the multiverse through which my characters travel. My previous novel, Oceanspace, had done well, so she believed that a similar title would attract the same readers who’d bought the last book, and brushed aside my argument that it might mislead readers to believe that there was a relationship between the two books. For this new edition, I’m restoring the original title, and hope that it will remain that way for as long as the novel continues to be reprinted.
A final note. Time Loves a Hero (formerly Chronospace) has occasionally confused readers. I’ve often received letters telling me that I made mistakes with the datelines of various scenes. There are no mistakes. This is a novel about time travel, and thus just as one must keep in mind the theory that time itself is not linear, neither is this book. So if you get a little lost or mixed up, keep reading … all will soon become clear.
Allen Steele
Whately, Massachusetts
November 2014
Autumn, 1365—8:05Z
The boy began climbing the mesa shortly after sunrise, stealing away from the village while his mother was making breakfast for his sisters. It wasn’t long before she noticed his absence; he heard her calling his name, her voice echoing off the sandstone bluffs of the canyon he called home, but by then he was almost a third of the way up the narrow trail leading to the top of the mesa.
Darting behind a pile of talus, he cautiously peered down at the adobe village. Pale brown smoke rose from fire pits within its circular walls, and tiny figures moved along the flat rooftops. There was no sign of pursuit, though, so after a few minutes he emerged from hiding and continued his long ascent.
He had hiked to the top of the mesa several times before, but always in the company of his father or one of his uncles, to set traps for tassel-ear squirrels and desert rabbits. The tribal elders had decreed that children were never to leave Tyuonyi alone, for it was only within the settlement’s fortified walls that they were safe from the Enemy. Yet the boy was never very obedient, and he had been plotting this journey for several weeks now. He knew of a stand of juniper trees that grew on top of the mesa. Although the morning was warm, the first frost had come to the canyon a few days ago, and juniper berries would now be sweet enough to eat. He had bided his time until his father and uncles went away on a hunting expedition, then he made his escape from the village.
The boy was little more than five years old, but he was almost as strong as a child twice his age; the soles of his bare feet were tough as leather, his small body accustomed to the rarefied air of the high desert. He scurried up the steep path winding along the mesa’s rugged cliffs, barely noticing the escarpments that plunged several hundred feet to the canyon floor. When he became thirsty, he paused to dig a small cactus out of the ground; he pulled its quills, peeled its skin, and chewed on its pulp as he continued his lonely trek.
It was shortly after he passed the landmark his father called Woman Rock—a sheer bluff scarred by an oval-shaped crevasse that bore a faint resemblance to a vagina—that he came to the place where deep blue sky met the ground. Suddenly, there was nowhere left to climb; the terrain lay flat, covered with mesquite and sage, with only blue-tinged mountain peaks in the far distance. He had reached the roof of the world.
The boy grinned broadly. He would find his juniper berries and stuff himself to his heart’s content, then he would swagger back down the trail to Tyuonyi, where he would regale his sisters and the other children with his tale of adventure. In his mind’s eye, he saw the tribal elders, impressed by his courage and fortitude, inviting him into their kiva, where he would undergo the sacred ceremonies which would affirm his status as a man. His mother and sisters would be proud of him, and when his father returned …
His father would probably tear off a willow branch and whip him to within an inch of his life.
Realizing this, the daydream vanished like so much cookfire smoke. Well, for better or worse, he was here. The least he could do was find a juniper tree.
He walked over to a nearby mesquite and lifted the flap of his loincloth. A thin yellow stream of urine irrigated its roots, and he sighed with satisfaction. The sun hadn’t yet climbed to its zenith, and he had plenty of time to find the object of his desire. Once he had eaten, perhaps he would locate a shady place to take a nap before …
A vague motion caught the corner of his eye.
The boy instinctively froze, not twitching a muscle as his dark eyes sought the source of the movement. For a moment he thought it might be a bird or a lizard, yet as he listened, he couldn’t detect any familiar animal sounds. Had it only been …?
There. Just to his left, about twenty paces away. A strange rippling pattern, like the forms hot air makes as it rises from sun-baked ground.
Turning very slowly, the boy studied the apparition. He half expected it to vanish any second, the way mirages always do when the breeze shifts a little, yet the pattern remained constant, spreading out before him like a wavering, transparent wall …
No. Not transparent … reflective, like the shallows of the creek that wound through the canyon. Indeed, he could see the reversed image of a nearby tree against its surface.
Remaining absolutely still, his heart thudding against his chest, he regarded the manifestation with dread and fascination. Then, ever so carefully, he knelt and, without taking his eyes from the strangeness, picked up a stone. Gathering his courage, he hesitated for another moment, then he leaped up and hurled the rock at the wall-of-air.
The boy had always possessed a keen eye. He had learned how to kill lizards when he was only three, and more recently had refined his talent to the point where he could knock a squirrel off a tree branch from twenty paces. The stone he threw now hurtled on a straight trajectory toward his selected point of reference, the center of the air-wall where the juniper tree was reflected …
The rock hit something that wasn’t there. It made an odd hollow sound, and in the briefest of instants, the boy glimpsed concentric whorls spreading outward from its point of impact. Then the rock bounced off the invisible surface and fell to the ground.
He was still staring at the place where stone had fallen when a ghostly hand touched his left shoulder.
“Go away, kid,” a voice said, in a language he couldn’t understand. “You’re bothering me.”
The boy leaped straight into the air. When his feet touched ground again, he was already running. His terrified scream echoed off the canyon walls as he sprinted back down the trail, the coveted juniper berries utterly forgotten.
A few moments passed, then the air shimmered around the place where the boy had stood. Thousands of tiny mirrors gradually assumed a man-shaped form until it solidified into a figure wearing a loose-fitting environment suit. He raised his gloved hands and pulled off his hood, then grinned at the invisible wall.
“Did you ever see someone run so fast?” he asked. “I bet he’s already halfway home.”
“That wasn’t a
very nice thing to do,” a woman’s voice said within his headset. “You could have hurt him.”
“Oh, don’t worry so much. Just gave him a scare, that’s all.” Tucking the hood beneath his arm, Donal Bartel wiped sweat off his shaved head as he walked to the edge of the mesa and peered over the side. Although he could see the top of the trail, the boy was nowhere in sight. “All right, he’s gone. Let’s finish up here.”
He turned to watch as the spectral wall began to materialize, taking the form and substance of a saucer-shaped craft. Perched above the rocky ground on five petal-like flanges, its electrochromatic outer skin resumed its natural appearance until the vessel’s silver hull dully reflected the hot sun overhead. Hemispherical pods beneath its lower fuselage emitted an amber glow which pulsated within the craft’s shadow.
“You’ve got everything you need?” From within the single porthole on the Miranda’s low turret, the timeship’s pilot peered out at him. “We could stay a little longer, if you think we’re not going to be bothered anymore.”
Donal pondered Hans’s question as he unzipped the stealth suit and shrugged out of it. The suit was useful for hiding from contemporaries, but in the desert heat it threatened to suffocate him. “He’s not coming back, but once he tells his folks what he’s seen up here, someone might come up to investigate.”
“I agree.” The woman who had spoken earlier was climbing down a ladder set within one of the landing flanges. “The Anasazi are a very wary people. Someone down there might think the boy saw a scout from an enemy tribe.”
Donal nodded. For the last two days, he and Joelle had studied this isolated settlement of pre-Pueblo native Americans. Seven hundred years from now, this place would be identified on maps as Burnt Mesa, overlooking Frijoles Canyon within the Bandelier National Monument, not far from the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico. By then, the village of Tyuonyi would be a collection of ancient ruins carefully preserved by the United States government. The site would have a gift shop and a museum, and thousands of tourists would visit this place every year to saunter among the crumbling remains of what had once been a thriving settlement.