“Huh—look at that,” Da Silva said. “There was still a revolt in Toulouse in 1218, same as in the earlier timeline. Looks like Montfort fought them and won. Apparently he didn’t die there, the way he did in the earlier history.”
Good for Toulouse, Ann thought. The more trouble the people of Languedoc could give him the better.
“What about Viscount Trencavel?” she asked.
“He died almost immediately, in the first wave of fighting.”
“So he never tried to negotiate with the crusaders?”
Da Silva shook her head. “Look, we have to start the debriefing now—there’s a number of things we have to get to before you can go home. The first thing is—well, you heard the technicians when you got back, there was a huge time-quake here. We changed a good deal, more than we usually do. So more things are going be different, and you’ll probably notice some of them, before you start to get used to this reality. For one thing, there’s a different president now. President John Henderson.”
Ann blinked. “A different—you can do that?”
Da Silva smiled. “We did, apparently. They’re very happy with all of you, up on the fifth floor.”
Ann didn’t smile back. She had never voted—she rarely paid attention to politics—but it still seemed wrong for these people to come here and change something so important.
Da Silva didn’t seem to notice. “You should watch the news, get used to the changes. We don’t want you making mistakes in your own tace.”
She went over a few other differences, all of them minor, and then said, “So what happened during the time you were away from the castle? You went to get the key, and you stayed away for an entire day.”
She wanted to trip Ann up with the change of subject, Ann knew. Still, she and Franny had discussed this on their way back, and she was ready with her story. “We were caught by the fighting, and we hid out in a deserted house. They’d left some food there, so we didn’t starve. And we used their beds to sleep on.”
“Where was the house?”
They hadn’t thought about this part. “I don’t really know. We got turned around a lot.”
“All right. And then when you got back you told Charles you saw Jerry, and that he was dead. Where did you see his body?”
“Near the market square.”
“And when? Before or after you hid out in the house?”
“After. When we were heading back.”
“What did you think?”
“What did I think? Well, I thought it was terrible that he died. Why couldn’t you have done that with Gregory? Bring him back like that?”
“Gregory? Right, I remember him. He died in Crete, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. Why couldn’t you just stop him before he left?”
“I don’t know. If he died on the trip, my guess would be that he had some defect, maybe his heart, something they missed in his physical.”
“So, what—he wasn’t any use to the company so they didn’t bother to bring him back?”
“I’m just guessing, like I said. I don’t really know.”
“Well, who does know? Wait, don’t tell me. The fifth floor.”
“That’s right,” Da Silva said.
THEY SENT HER HOME a few days later. She thought she’d answered Da Silva’s questions fairly well, that they didn’t suspect where she’d been in those missing twenty-four hours. They’d told her to be available for more debriefings, though, so she knew they weren’t finished with her yet.
She went to her computer as soon as she got home. The program she had started was still running, and she saw to her annoyance that it hadn’t unlocked the encryption yet.
She yanked the drive out of the port and threw it across the room. I’m sorry, Meret, she thought. If you wanted to tell me something you should have made it easier to get to.
Her refrigerator was empty, and she headed out to buy groceries. When she got to the supermarket she saw that several guards were standing by the doors, looking over the shoppers as they went inside. People seemed wary of them, almost frightened, and when she came closer she realized that they weren’t guards at all but policemen. One of them said something into his phone as she passed.
She had forgotten Da Silva’s suggestion to watch the news. What had happened at the market, that they had needed to call out the police?
She got a shopping cart and started down the aisles. There were great gaps in the shelves now, she saw, and one entire row had been taken out, leaving gouges in the linoleum. Someone pushed in front of her to take the last box of the cereal she liked. What the hell? she thought. She got a different cereal and went to find milk.
The milk section looked as shabby as the rest of the market. Most of the cartons were past their sell-by date, and there was a sour, rancid smell coming from the refrigerator. It reminded her of the kitchen in Carcassonne, where the milk had been stored in a cool shadowed place but had still turned bad after three or four days.
She studied the dates on the milk cartons, looking for one that hadn’t expired. She found one and took it—and a man standing next to her grabbed it out of her hand.
It felt like the last straw. “Hey, that’s mine!” she said.
“Well, it’s mine now,” the man said, holding it out of her reach.
“You saw me take it.”
“So?”
“So you know it’s mine. Give it to me.” She made a grab for it, and he moved it out of her way.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I’m much stronger than you are.”
He turned and put the milk in his cart. She felt her anger rise up inside her like a wave, until it seemed to take her over completely. She shoved her shopping cart at him, hitting him in the legs.
He whirled around and seized her by the arm. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “Come along, girlie.”
He pulled her down an aisle and then over to the produce section. A policeman stood there, looking out at the shoppers.
“This little thief tried to steal the milk out of my cart,” the man said.
“No I didn’t!” Ann said, more startled than offended. “He was the one—he took my milk, just grabbed it out of my hand.”
“Did she, sir?” the policeman said, ignoring Ann. “Give her here—I’ll take care of it.”
“What!” Ann said.
The man shoved her over toward the policeman. She kicked out at his legs, but the policeman grasped her by the arm and tugged her away.
“You cut that out,” he said, shaking her roughly. “You don’t want me to add assault to your offenses.”
“What offenses?” she asked. “I didn’t do anything!”
Once again the policeman ignored her. “Do you want to press charges, sir?” he asked the man.
The man looked at the two of them, hesitating. Finally he shook his head. “It’ll more trouble than it’s worth,” he said, sounding disgusted. “Just keep her away from me.” He turned away, heading back toward the refrigerator.
“I hope someone stole your milk!” Ann shouted after him.
“You leave him alone, do you understand?” the policeman said. “He was kind enough to drop the charges—you don’t want him changing his mind. Now let me see your ID.”
My ID? she thought. She opened her mouth to ask why, then closed it again and took out her California Identification, what she had instead of a driver’s license. It looked different somehow, but she wasn’t sure how.
The policeman ran the ID over his phone, which sounded a quick tune when it had absorbed her information. Then he spoke a few words of explanation into the microphone. “All right,” he said when he was done. “Let’s go finish your shopping.”
She headed back toward her cart. The policeman went with her, walking ostentatiously at her side. To her surprise she found that she was trembling, terrified that he might arrest her.
Why had she argued with that man? She was usually so good at keeping quiet, at never coming to the attenti
on of anyone in authority. But how could it be right to steal like that? And why had the policeman been so ready to believe him over her?
The man had moved away from the milk, she was relieved to see. She picked up a carton that had expired and did the rest of her shopping as quickly as she could, the policeman staying with her as she headed through the aisles. It was only as she reached the checkout that he moved away from her, and even then he watched as she left the store.
She was still shaking while she waited for the bus, and as she got on. She fell into a seat and spread her bags out in front of her. “For God’s sake, lady, put those away,” a man said, walking past her. “You could break your neck.”
She called Franny as soon as she got home and told her what had happened at the market. She had expected Franny to laugh at her fears, but instead the other woman said, “You know, now that you mention it I met some rude people too.”
“People, or men?”
“You’re right, it was mostly men. Though there was this one woman at the gym—”
Franny went to a gym? She was constantly being brought up against how different they were.
“Have you been watching the news?” Franny asked.
“Yeah, I was supposed to, but I never got around to it. I know we have a different president.”
“It’s not just that. There are food shortages all over the country, and gas shortages, and even martial law in some places. And they’re talking about bringing martial law to California too, saying that people are rioting because of the shortages. You’re lucky they didn’t arrest you—they seem to be looking for excuses.”
“Is this what the company wanted, do you think?”
“I don’t know. And if it is, what can we do about it? Do you still want to—”
“Why don’t we talk when I see you?” Ann said quickly. She wouldn’t put it past the company to bug their phones.
“Sure. All right.”
She hung up and went back to the computer to look at news sites. She saw very little about the shortages and martial law; instead the sites seemed to emphasize how stable the world had gotten, how few wars there were. Reading between the lines, though, she saw that there were more dictators as well, and more police states. The world seemed more peaceful, but also more oppressed, regimented, whole populations terrified into silence and obedience.
And yet—hadn’t it always been like this? She rarely paid attention to the news, after all; maybe she had just never noticed how many totalitarian regimes there were. Or was she forgetting the world she had lived in, already taking this new reality as her own?
After a while she began to notice gaps in the net, like the empty spaces in the supermarket. Some of her favorite sites had disappeared, and others were missing links and posts she remembered from earlier visits. Finally she found an archive that hadn’t been deleted, and she followed some hints in older posts to an underground site.
Here at last was a place where people exchanged ideas and information about the new government. But despite calls for rebellion, even revolution, there was no real opposition to President Henderson. The posters seemed to have been caught off guard by his swift proclamations of martial law, by the new laws giving him more power. Or maybe it was as she had thought so many times before, that most people in the United States had been lulled into sleep by reality shows and video games, that as long as they had a new gadget or television show to look forward to they would do nothing to disturb their easy lives.
That site led to others, and she ended up looking at a list of people who had disappeared into the prison system. It made her wonder if she had a record now, if that policeman had filed a report about her. She went on the city’s police site, but it proved much harder to hack into than before. It took her several hours to break through the various firewalls, and then another hour to make sure her file was completely deleted.
While she was there she looked at some of the other arrest records. A great many people had been sent to jail for “disturbing the peace,” which seemed to mean arguing with a policeman or someone else in authority. Franny had been right; she had been very lucky not to have been arrested.
THE NEXT DAY SHE got another email from the company, about another debriefing that morning. When she got to her assigned room she saw Franny arguing heatedly with Da Silva.
“That isn’t what I’m talking about,” Franny said. “You— you changed my country. You put someone else in as president. And martial law—”
“Look,” Da Silva said. She nodded to Ann, indicating to her to take a seat. “As I told Ann here, I don’t know all the ins and outs of this situation. But neither do you. There are things happening here that you can’t understand, that you’re seeing from only one perspective. Every tace has its own blind spots, believes in things that aren’t necessarily true. Here in the United States you have a sort of fetish about democracy—”
“Fetish?” Franny said, appalled.
“Maybe fetish is the wrong word. But if you lived in my tace you’d see how much damage a democracy can do.”
“Well, but we don’t live in your tace.”
Ann looked at Franny, trying to warn her off the subject. The other woman seemed to understand, and she shrugged at Da Silva as if she didn’t want to argue further.
“Anyway,” Da Silva said firmly. “That’s not why I asked you here. I brought you in because it’s time for you to see Jerry. Ann, I know you’ve already met him, and Franny, you’ve been told he isn’t dead, but I still wanted to prepare you. You might feel dizzy, or see two realities superimposed, one where he died and one where he’s still alive. Don’t worry, though—you’ll adapt pretty quickly to this new reality. And the other thing I want to warn you about is that you shouldn’t make any reference to his death, or seeing his body. If you’re confused by all of this, imagine how he feels.”
She called out, and a woman led Jerry into the room. “Hi, guys,” he said.
“Hi,” Franny said, her voice barely audible.
She was struggling with the sight of him, Ann saw, trying to reconcile her memories. But the dizziness Ann had felt on seeing him earlier was gone; to her surprise Jerry’s presence seemed natural, an established fact. It was true what Da Silva said, then—she had already accepted this reality.
“How are you feeling?” she asked him.
“Fine. Well, fine for someone who was dead for a while. Or so they tell me.” He laughed awkwardly.
“Yeah,” she said. “That must have been weird.”
“You know, it isn’t, not really. I don’t remember dying, anyway. I was looking for that shop near the market, the shoemaker’s, and then I was here, on the platform.”
“So you were—you were following us?”
Da Silva frowned at her. Jerry ignored her, though. “Yeah,” he said. “Charles told me to.”
“But why?”
“Ann,” Da Silva said. “It isn’t good for him to talk about this.”
“No, it’s all right,” Jerry said. “He said that you were part of some organization, but that’s all I remember.” He shook his head. “So are you? A member of whatever it was?”
“No, of course not.”
“I didn’t think so. I mean, how could you be? You didn’t know anyone there, same as the rest of us.”
Da Silva began to ask them questions, and before Ann knew it the interrogation had started again. They went over the same ground as before, her mind only half on her answers.
She remembered the flashes of feeling she’d gotten in Alexandria after her concussion, the sense that she didn’t really belong there. Had the mob caught up with her in an alternate timeline, hurting her or—was it possible?—even killing her? And then had someone gone to the timeline before the mob had done its work and extracted her, sent her twenty-four years into the future? But who would do such a thing, and why?
They finished with Da Silva about an hour later. “Do you want a ride home?” Franny asked her.
“Sure,” sh
e said. Then, remembering all the rude people she had encountered the day before, she added, “Thanks.”
They got in the car, and Ann directed Franny to her apartment. Franny began talking as soon as they got on the road, as if her frustrations ran off the same battery as the car. “Why do you think they wanted this—all of this—” She took her hands off the steering wheel and waved them at the passing streets, as if to indicate everything that had happened—Ann’s policeman, martial law, the new president. “What do they get out of it?”
“Well, Strickland said they don’t have a lot of resources up there, wherever it is they come from,” Ann said. “This way they can take control of what there is a lot earlier, get a start on their problems before they become overwhelmed.”
“I guess so. There do seem to be a lot more start-ups now, for solar power and wind power. More than I remember from before.”
“Well, there you are.”
“And there’s more shortages too—gas and coal, food and water. They can’t be transporting all of that to their own tace, can they? I mean, that would take a hell of a lot of energy, much more than they’d have.”
Ann had never thought of that. “They wouldn’t have to transport it, though. Just hide it somewhere and pick it up in the future.”
“The food would go bad though. And how do you hide water?”
“I don’t know. But coal—that wouldn’t be too hard.”
“So they could be stealing our coal, along with everything else. We don’t even matter to them—they think they can do whatever they want to us.”
“The real question is, what can we do about it?” Ann asked. “I want to join Core, but I don’t even know who they are, or where.”
Even as she said this, though, she remembered Azelaïs and her litany of names: Khartoum, Karnak, Carthage, Corinth …
“But Core can’t really do anything, can they?” Franny said. “I mean, how do you fight against people who can change the past? The company’ll just go back in time and stop them. Or kill them, like Greg.”
Weighing Shadows Page 24
