“Well, look at what they did in Languedoc. They changed just one thing in the past, one battle, and we got this whole new reality. So maybe all we need to do is change something here, something small. Maybe Core knows what it is.”
“That’s another thing I wonder about. How did conquering Languedoc give us all of this?”
“Because, well, look,” Ann said slowly, trying to put her ideas into words. “Everywhere we went, the same thing happened. The company supported a strong authority over a weaker one, a male-dominated world over one where women were more important. So the matriarchy in Kaphtor disappeared, and the troubadours in Languedoc, and in Alexandria … Well, I don’t know what happened in Alexandria, but I think the books we rescued went on to help them somehow. And they didn’t want to save Hypatia.”
“Who’s Hypatia?”
“Never mind. What I’m saying is, all of that added up to what we have now—a world filled with dictatorships, with authoritarian governments. With women being less and less important. That policeman yesterday—he didn’t even pretend to listen to me, he was that sure that the man was right.”
“You sound like a feminist.”
“Well, of course I—” Ann stopped, surprised. “I am a feminist. Aren’t you?”
“Well, I agree with some things. But who’s to say women would do a better job than men at running things?”
“But—but you saw how women ran things. In Kaphtor.” It was amazing that someone as intelligent as Franny hadn’t realized that, Ann thought. But people were good at ignoring things that didn’t match their beliefs. “They didn’t have any wars, not for thousands of years. And they had enough food for everyone, and this amazing art and technology—”
“And they killed an innocent man, once every seven years.”
“I’m not saying women should necessarily be in charge all the time. Just that they should be equal, should have equal chances.”
They were coming up on her street; she didn’t have nearly enough time to explain her point of view. She indicated her apartment building and Franny pulled over to the curb.
“Hey, why don’t you just get a car?” Franny said. “You have to have enough money, with what they pay us.”
Ann shrugged. She knew why, though. She needed to save as much as she could; she didn’t know how much longer she would be with the company.
“I’ll talk to you later,” she said. “Think about what I said.”
SHE SURFED THE NET after she got home, looking for other things that had changed in this world. By late afternoon her neck hurt, and she had the beginning of a headache. And she felt hungry; the meeting at the company had been at ten in the morning and she hadn’t had breakfast or lunch. She leaned back in her chair and stretched.
There was something on the floor, near the wall. She got up and went to look at it. It was the thumb drive, lying where she had thrown it.
It looked different, though. It had opened up like a jack-knife, revealing an LED display of a long string of numbers. A moment later the numbers changed, and then changed again.
She was an idiot. She didn’t need a password, all she had to do was plug in the drive and enter the numbers it showed. Meret hadn’t made it difficult for her. Just the opposite, in fact—she had made it as easy as possible.
She was eager to get started, but she forced herself to slow down and examine the drive. It was hinged, with the display hidden beneath an outer covering. She opened and closed it a few times, working carefully. You had to press a certain spot to open it; that had been the problem. Meret hadn’t realized that she had never seen a drive like it before.
She went back to the computer and plugged it in, then entered the string of numbers it showed. Nothing happened. She bit back a scream of frustration and studied the drive again. Da Silva had plugged something like it into the elevator, to access the fifth floor. Could that be what the drive did, was it actually a key? Did Meret want her to visit the nerve center of the company?
Still, maybe it was just what it looked like, a flash drive. She worked at her computer some more, but she could discover nothing new. Finally she ate a sandwich, took some aspirin, and pulled her couch out into a bed.
Her mind raced in circles, though, refusing to let her sleep. What hadn’t she tried? Did the drive have the answers to her questions, did it explain everything she wanted to know about the company? She felt an almost physical hunger for what might be on it. Information, tasty information.
No, it had to be a key to the elevator; she’d have to try it again, this time plugging in whatever numbers showed up on the drive. Had Da Silva said when they were going to summon her back to the company? She imagined plugging the drive into the elevator and riding up to the fifth floor, and then she fell asleep and dreamed about angels working at the company’s terminals, and other angels flying overhead, carrying messages.
SHE HAD AN EMAIL waiting for her the next day, telling her to report for another debriefing. She felt a sudden excitement and sat down at the computer, staring at the message.
She should wait, should think about what it would mean to venture up to the fifth floor. She would have to pass herself off as a programmer from the future, would have to pretend to know how their computers worked, or find out in a hurry. It would be dangerous to go haring up there without a plan.
Still, how could she plan for something like this? She went through her sparse wardrobe, trying to find something with clashing colors. Finally she took out a purple skirt and pink blouse and tried them on together. Not as eye-straining as some of the outfits she had seen on the fifth floor, but it would have to do.
Her appointment was for ten in the morning again. She glanced at the computer’s clock; it was just after six, plenty of time to get there by nine, when they opened. She worked at the computer for a while and ate some breakfast. Then she gathered together all the money she had in the apartment. It came to six hundred dollars, and she realized that she had been collecting it for some time, that for a while now she had thought this day would come. That she would have to run from the company, to hide somewhere the cameras couldn’t find her.
She arrived at the company at nine. If she ran into problems, she thought, she could just say she’d gotten there early and skip the elevator until next time. But the receptionist, her first hurdle, just nodded at her and buzzed the door open.
She went down the hall to the elevator, walking as slowly as she could to avoid suspicion. Someone was coming toward her, a man who looked like Jerry. Damn—it was him.
“Hey, Ann,” Jerry said. “I’m glad I caught you. I wanted to ask you a question.”
She stopped. “Sure.”
“I think I remembered something. After you left the shoemaker’s you and Franny went somewhere else, didn’t you? I was following you down a street, and I saw you point to something … Do you remember that?”
She shook her head. “A street? Where?”
“I don’t know. It’s been driving me crazy—I can almost bring it into focus, but not quite. You sure you don’t remember?”
What if more of that trip came back to him? The street, and the word on the wall? What would happen if the company found the sisters of Kore?
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Ann said.
“Well, think about it, okay? I’m pretty sure I saw it. What are you doing up so early?”
“What are you?”
“I’m going to talk to Charles. See if he knows anything.”
“Okay. See you.”
She hurried away from him, toward the elevator, and pressed the button to summon it. It came and she got on. She plugged in the drive, entered the string of numbers it showed her, and hit the button for five.
The elevator moved smoothly upward.
NO ONE PAID ANY attention to her when she stepped out onto the fifth floor. She hurried to the far end of the room and found a free computer and sat in front of it. Then she plugged in the drive and entered the numbers on the display.
A p
rogram seemed to detect the drive and automatically launch itself, then prompted her for a password. She tried all the ones she had used before: “Core,” “Cor,” and “Kore,” then “Persephone,” and finally “Hypatia.” The screen cleared and changed to Meret’s homepage.
She glanced down at the keyboard. It didn’t seem very different from the ones she was used to, though there were a few keys she didn’t recognize. She played around with them, figuring out what they did, and then called up the directory.
There were dozens of files, far too many to take in at once. At the head of the list was something called “Reminder.” Every other file was in alphabetical order; did Meret want her to look at this one especially?
She opened it. It was short, just a few lines. “Reminder: Sending an employee only a few hours into the past or future requires a great deal of modeling; in fact, as the intervals in time get smaller and smaller the problems of insertion and extraction grow proportionally greater. It is far easier to move an employee decades or even centuries. If an employee is in danger and must be extracted at once it is better to send him some years into the future. After he has been inserted into a safe tace, you will have time to calculate when and where you can reinsert him.
“Remember also that this method does not involve a key but is instead done remotely, from the fifth floor. This means that you will have to work out both the traveler’s beginning dates and his end dates from your station here. This is in contrast to travelers who use a key, whose time of extraction can be controlled from the past by that key and thus are open-ended. These two types of travel are called Closed and Open.”
Ann understood Meret’s meaning immediately, though the file was couched in such vague generalities she doubted if anyone in the company would get it. Meret was telling her that she had been the one to send Ann ahead in time, to 415, to get her out of danger while she calculated the safest way to return her to 391. Probably when Meret had gotten back from her assignment in Alexandria, before she had been sent to Kaphtor, she had looked through the archives and seen Ann on the camera feed, being attacked by the mob. And probably she had done exactly what Ann was doing, she had stolen moments on the computer, and had very little time in which to work. She had acted quickly, had sent Ann to 415 on the spur of the moment, maybe because they had discussed Hypatia’s death.
And maybe she had wondered, just a little bit, if Ann could help Hypatia, could save her from the mob that wanted to kill her. But some historical events, the company had taught, could not be changed, no matter how many people they sent to solve the problem.
It was no wonder, Ann thought, that she felt so much out of place, as if she didn’t belong in this timeline. She might have died, like Jerry, or survived and been left for dead, or been raped by the mob.
She shivered. This was the second time Meret had saved her life; it seemed she owed her for far more than just opening her eyes to the company’s misdeeds.
She had discovered the answer to a smaller puzzle as well. She’d wondered how she’d been moved without a key, and why there had been a gap of five hours between the time she’d left Alexandria in 391 and when she’d been returned. Now she realized it was probably because Meret had been working in a hurry and hadn’t had time to be precise. Meret’s information also meant that she didn’t need a key to travel now, a great relief, since she didn’t have any idea where to find one. Though it also meant she would have to program her beginning and end dates beforehand.
But why hadn’t the company found this evidence of Meret’s meddling? They had been determined to discover where Ann had gone during the time she was away; she couldn’t believe they hadn’t checked the feed from the camera, the same feed Meret had used.
She looked through the directory and found a file called “Videos,” clicked on it, and entered the time and place she was looking for. But although she found herself in Alexandria, along with film of Elias, Da Silva, and Zachery, there was nothing showing her and the mob at the library. Meret had somehow managed to erase it. She felt an extraordinary relief.
She studied the alphabetized list for other messages from Meret but found nothing. Perhaps they had been hidden to prevent the company from seeing them, but if so Meret had done too good a job of it; Ann couldn’t find them either.
She did find a manual for the launch room, though, a tutorial for new employees. She opened it and paged through, fascinated by the technology.
She learned that the time machine had its own internal timeline, that voyages to the past took place in strict chronological order. So that, according to this timeframe, Gregory’s assignment to the Spanish Inquisition had happened before his assignment to Kaphtor, even though, in the world’s chronology, he had appeared in Spain in 1506 and in Kaphtor around 1,500 years before Christ. The company had found it necessary to impose this timeline in order to, as the manual said, “keep everything from happening all at once. If all our assignments occurred at the same time, we would never know which assignments caused which results, and everything would be in chaos.”
She also discovered that the company could not travel into their own future, that they had no way of knowing how their manipulations had changed the world. Why, though, hadn’t someone come back from the future to visit them? The company was divided on the answer. One faction thought that this silence meant that they had failed, that no one had survived much beyond 2327. Another group argued that the people of the future had kept away on purpose, that they knew that by simply being there they could change the timelines, could affect the company’s project in negative ways. This claim had the virtue of optimism, of a belief that there would be a future, and that it was viable.
A loud commotion sounded at the door. “Ann Decker,” someone called. “Is she here?”
She looked up quickly. No one pointed her out; none of these people knew her. But men were fanning out through the room, and although she was at the far end someone would eventually reach her station. She erased her tracks through the computer, logged off, and grabbed the thumb drive.
Now what? She couldn’t head toward the door; one of the men would stop her, take away the drive. Arrest her for having it, probably. She was trapped.
No, there was one way out. She walked toward the room with the small launch pad, trying not to draw attention, to look as if she had important work to do. Once inside she closed the door and ran to the controls. The computer was already on, and set for 2327. She tapped the screen and hurried up onto the platform.
She felt the familiar time sickness, saw the piercing lights. She struggled to stay upright, to hold onto an awareness of her surroundings. When the nausea ended she saw that she was still in the launch room on the fifth floor, exactly where she had wanted to be. And the year was—she stepped off the platform and studied the computer—2327.
She opened the door and went outside. Once again no one paid any attention to her; everyone was focused on their own work. The computer workstations were where they had been in her own time, she saw. That made sense—people who traveled from one tace to another would want things to remain as familiar as possible. The machine she had used was occupied, though, and she went to a computer two stations down, far enough so that no one could peer over her shoulder.
She looked around her. The lights were more muted here, to save energy perhaps. Possibly in response to that the clothes were even brighter than in her tace, the colors more clashing. A lot of them were asymmetrical too, missing a sleeve or half a collar. Her own outfit, hastily put together, seemed even more out of place.
The keyboard looked more or less the same as the earlier one. She logged on, but she felt too worried about the men who had come looking for her to concentrate. When she hadn’t shown up at the debriefing Jerry had no doubt told Da Silva that he had seen her heading toward the elevator. They couldn’t know that she had the thumb drive, though, so they had almost certainly checked out the fifth floor just to be thorough. Maybe they’d thought she had snuck in with someone who had
a key.
But it would probably never occur to them that she could use the time machine, and that she had gone into the future. They had such low opinions of their employees in the past, after all. And even if they thought to examine the machine, there was already an explanation for why it was set for the year 2327: someone had used it before her.
Still, they could have ways of finding her that she had never thought of. She might not have much time. So now what? she thought. What should she do with the brief window she did have?
She knew the answer to that, though; it seemed she had always known it. She had to find a way to change history back to what it had been—and to do so in a way that the company couldn’t change it back.
But she would have to go to a place where she already knew the language, and where her biome matched the existing bacteria. That meant she could only visit three time-frames, a pretty serious limitation. Or she could try some other tace, see how long she could survive there and how quickly she could learn the language.
Biomes, she thought, alarmed. She hadn’t had a swab for the time she found herself in now—could she be missing some vital bacteria? She didn’t feel ill, but there might be something here that would take a while to affect her. And all their teachers had said that the future was terribly polluted.
She should get to work, then. She searched the directory and found a tutorial for computer modeling.
It started off with Monte Carlo Markov chains, she saw, and she felt thankful that she had studied them earlier. But the tutorial grew more difficult to follow as she continued, and when she looked at her computer clock she saw that it had taken her twenty minutes to go through ten pages. And there were dozens of pages more, and those looked even harder.
She forced herself on, though, and twenty pages later she understood enough to think about modeling, about what events she could try to change. What if she went back, saw Trencavel, and persuaded him not to believe anything the angel said? She entered the variables she needed, looked carefully through the code for errors, and clicked Execute.
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