Alice Payne Arrives

by Kate Heartfield

  Yes, things do get better, sometimes. That’s what kept Prudence going, all those years on the Rudolf mission. That’s what kept her from pulling the trigger on Project Shipwreck, until now.

  There have been great heroes, on both Farmer and Misguided sides. Great deeds done.

  More often, when something gets better, it’s the perverse result of the Misguideds and the Farmers trying to undo each other’s work.

  Smallpox eradication in the twentieth century is the classic result of serendipity, although both sides claim it as a victory now. The Farmers, suspicious of global institutions, tried to embarrass the World Health Organization by setting it up to fail. The Misguideds were trying to turn the Soviet Union into an upstanding member of the global community. And to everyone’s surprise, the posturing actually wiped out humanity’s greatest scourge, almost as a side effect.

  Prudence could tell Alice about that, but Alice’s hope would complicate things. She doesn’t have ten years for Alice to go through the same process Prudence has, of learning the dangers of optimism. None of the successes make up for the failures. Humanity will be better off as it was before, without time travel.

  She takes Alice’s hand and looks into her eyes. Now’s the time to make her believe it’s all up to her, and make her believe she can’t do it alone.

  “There is a Farmer agent there with those men, ready to jog an elbow at just the right time and save Franz Ferdinand’s life. The Farmers prefer that option to the Karl option. They’ve made their choices. You make yours. Do you want to run toward those men, now, and stop that Farmer from catching that man, and hope that the shot hits Franz Ferdinand? Hope that it doesn’t spray into other people, and start other catastrophes?”

  Alice frowns, looks out toward the voices. Any moment now. There isn’t time, no time to think. Prudence very deliberately didn’t give her any time to think. Alice will fail here, let a man die out of hesitation, and then she’ll have just enough guilt to be useful.

  The shots, oddly out of place, and people shouting.

  Alice jumps, shudders.

  “There it is,” whispers Prudence. “The man lives.”

  “You didn’t give me time,” says Alice through gritted teeth. “I don’t know why you’ve shown me all this, if we won’t act.”

  “Because what I’m asking you to do is to act, Alice! To put an end to all this, and now that you know a little, you have to know everything or you won’t do it. You have to understand why. We’ve made a horrible mess of it, Alice, and every time we try to repair the damage, it gets worse. There’s only one way to stop it, and it will require all your highwayman courage, Alice.”

  Alice raises her eyebrows. “I hope our next stop includes whiskey, then.”

  Prudence laughs, for the first time in years beyond count, and the men beyond go quiet, as if they have heard something.

  “We must leave,” she says, and opens the shimmer.

  2070

  Prudence tells Alice to sit in Prudence’s office chair, and she does, straight-backed as if she were in a drawing room with a cup of tea. She takes the little black box from Prudence, turns it over in her hands. Helmut designed its user interface with an eighteenth-century naïf in mind: it has a mechanical button, in red-painted metal, with an aluminum wire cage over top.

  “The cage is for safety,” says Prudence. “You unlock it with this key, and then you depress the button. You will not notice anything, and no one in your world will notice anything. The only consequence to your life will be fifty thousand pounds, which you will find buried beside the milestone on Dray Road. It won’t be there until July second.”

  “And if I change my mind?”

  “Then time travel will continue to exist, which means I will go to July second and remove the reward. You’ll go on with your life just as it is, but without the satisfaction of knowing you’ve put an end to an otherwise endless war that will just keep poisoning humanity’s future and its past. And without the fifty thousand pounds. Then I will travel back a few days to find someone else to do the job for me.”

  It isn’t quite that simple. The moment Prudence, Helmut and Rati press their own button and put Project Shipwreck into motion, sending more than two billion Misguided people five hundred years into their future, Prudence will be a fugitive. She’ll have to find her new patsy in 1788 while outrunning General Almo and the rest of the TCC. But she has a plan B. And a plan C, and a plan D.

  And she has no intention of telling Alice about Project Shipwreck. She doesn’t need to know about that.

  “I understand,” says Alice. “I’m ready.”

  “Well, good, but I’m not. I have one last bit of time travel to take care of, so I need to do that before I send you back.”

  “I thought you said you would send me back with one hour to spare.”

  “Yes, but the moment I send you back to do it, it will have been done. Time travel will become impossible, the moment I change history by sending you back. I will no longer exist in 2070. I will exist in my own time, in the twenty-second century, and I will remember none of this.”

  She is fairly sure that is what will happen. If she exists at all. But she has been preparing for this martyrdom, for losing her memory of the life she has lived and perhaps even life itself, for a very long time. For three years, Helmut has been working on his EEG scanning and Rati has been shimmer-stealing to finance the purchase of the very large, very expensive twenty-second-century bacterial power cells that sit in the basement of this twenty-first-century suburban home.

  They are ready.

  “The moment we have done what we need to do, I will open a shimmer for you here in this room. You must step through it, without hesitation, as soon as it appears.”

  Alice nods, still looking at the device in her hands.

  It is a sophisticated little thing, although it looks simple on the outside. It will emit a strong electromagnetic pulse at the same moment as the gravitational waves from the Dove Nebula hit the Earth. If that pulse were constant and predictable, time travellers could simply use that as their beacon. But it will not be. It will be a random, ever-changing signal. A beacon that changes, and should make it impossible for travellers to use a relativistic four-dimensional map.

  Prudence sits in the chair opposite Alice, covers her hands in her own, looks into Alice’s eyes. “Listen. I didn’t go looking for you. But you came through, intelligent and courageous, a goddamn black woman making her own luck in eighteenth-century England, and I decided to see it as fate. A person starts to have a relationship with fate, after spending their life in time travel. You start to recognize it on the road. But fate is just a set of options you hadn’t considered. The choice is yours. Alice, if you don’t want to do this, tell me now and I will send you back.”

  Alice looks up with an expression that Prudence can’t read, and says nothing for a long while. Then she smiles and takes a deep breath.

  “I have a relationship with fate too. My father came home much changed from King George’s long and pointless war in America. If I understand you correctly, this war of yours is making our wars even longer and bloodier. You can depend on me, Major Zuniga.”

  Prudence leans back, looks for a long moment at her face. “Then it’s goodbye. And thank you. Remember, you’ll have one hour before sunset. I’ll return you to the place you left. The device has a timer that will tell you precisely when to press the button.”

  She looks long and hard at Alice, and then grabs a piece of paper and a pencil off her table and writes a brief letter, a last letter, just in case.

  She thinks of Rudolf, writing his letters from Mayerling, loading his gun.

  Prudence leaves Alice in her workroom and stands on the landing of the horrible staircase, the bright green carpet never clean. She won’t miss this house; of course, if all goes well, she won’t even remember it to miss.

  She opens a shimmer one last time, delivers her letter, and steps back through.

  Then Prudence goes down
to the basement, where Helmut and Rati are eating ravioli cold out of cans and staring at the numbers on Helmut’s screen.

  “It’s time,” says Prudence. “My 1788 patsy showed up here, unexpectedly. I don’t want to miss the chance. If I send her back now without the button, she’s a tainted naïf who knows too much and could have all kinds of effects. She’s ready to go now, so we have to be too.”

  Helmut looks up at her, his face red, but he says, “I’m ready.”

  Rati says nothing, only nods. She looks at Helmut, and then lifts her chin and looks at Prudence.

  “All right, then,” Prudence breathes, and sits down on the ratty couch.

  Rati’s frantic journeys around the globe, shimmer by shimmer, have not only been for fund-raising by theft. She has also planted long-range EEG scanners in every major city. They won’t capture every Misguided soul on the planet on June 29, 2070, but they will capture at least two billion.

  Then those power cells will be put to work to lock on to each of those two billion people and transport them to the year 2555. Way downstream. Nobody knows what happens in 2555, because it’s so volatile, so long after the beginning of the History War.

  An entire generation of Misguideds, instead of being on Earth at the beginning of that war, will be absent. They can’t affect anything, from so far downstream, not if time travel is effectively disabled. The world will be the Farmers’ to shape for a generation, and that generation will matter. Its work cannot be undone.

  Prudence Zuniga is not content to simply put an end to the unending war. She is going to win it first, for her side.

  Project Shipwreck is a tactic her superiors long ago considered and discarded, because they couldn’t fathom how they would prevent a counterattack. They did not, would not, consider disabling time travel. Only Prudence has the stones for that. Prudence and her two young radicals, whom she will never see or remember again.

  “It has been an honour,” she says. “On my mark, Helmut.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: In Which Jane Is Given a Commission

  1788

  WITH THE EXCEPTION OF the black mask, which is no longer on her face but tied to her belt, Alice is still dressed as a highwayman, from her cocked hat to her black boots, when she steps through the gateway into Jane’s study and comes face to face with Captain Wray Auden.

  His face goes from surprise to a sad smile, very quickly.

  “I hoped I was wrong,” he whispers.

  Alice’s heart seizes. She could step back through the gateway—damn, it’s closed. Major Zuniga must have set it to open for a certain length of time.

  But Jane can use the time-wheel, now, to get them away from here.

  Major Zuniga’s demonstration has convinced Alice of one thing: that the History War must end, that time travel can’t be the domain of two armies bent on shaping the world to their will.

  But beyond that, Alice does not know what to do. The thought of destroying time travel wrenches her gut. If she simply refuses to act, Major Zuniga will find someone else. And Major Zuniga can travel back in time to find someone else. Alice can’t see a way to win.

  So she has played for time, played the part of a convert, to get back to Jane. She needs Jane’s help. She needs Jane’s mind.

  But Jane does not look inclined to even speak to her.

  Jane is even holding the time-wheel in her hands, standing a little behind Auden. Her blue eyes are wide and she is staring at Alice as if she is nearly as surprised as Auden is. And of course, she must be. She did not know Alice had come to her study last night, had opened another gateway.

  “Well,” says Auden, having recovered himself, “now we have an answer to the mystery of why Miss Payne was not at Fleance Hall today, although how you manage to come and go like a stage magician is a mystery still. Perhaps when you explain that, we’ll have an answer to how the Earl of Ludderworth was abducted. And at last, we have an answer to the mystery of the identity of the Holy Ghost.”

  Why doesn’t Jane open a gateway?

  “Are you going to take me to the lockup, Captain Auden?” She smiles at him, not looking at Jane, not giving him the slightest clew that Jane is her accomplice. She wills him to look at her, not to look around the room at the wooden arms and legs, to make the connexion between Jane’s hobby and the Holy Ghost’s silent partner. Stay silent, Jane, for God’s sake, if you’re not going to get me out of here.

  “I must take you to the magistrate, and he’ll decide where you should be kept. I will recommend that you be taken to another county. There will be an uproar, and unkind things in the newspapers.”

  “Captain Auden, I rob groups of armed men. Do you think I am afraid of unkind things in the newspapers?”

  There’s the sad smile again. “I do not think you can expect mercy, I’m sorry to say, from the newspapers or from the magistrate. Usually when we catch a highwayman, we offer him the chance to become a thief-taker and pay his debt to England that way, and save his neck. In your case, that will not be an option, of course.”

  “Oh, of course. It would be unthinkable that a woman could be a thief-taker.” She lets him squirm for a moment, wondering if she is serious. Jane is stock-still. She might as well be an automaton herself.

  And then Jane speaks. “If the magistrate will not show mercy, perhaps you can.”

  Auden turns to her. “I am bound by duty, Miss Hodgson, however horrible I may find it. I am sorry.”

  “Your duty, yes, is to bring her to the magistrate. But give her the small human kindness of a few minutes to get herself into decent clothing, and to say a private word to Colonel Payne.”

  Dear Jane. She is always thinking, that mind working away. Like the device in Alice’s hand, so simple on the outside, so complex within. She has less than an hour, now, before she is meant to plant the device and secure the reward. The reward that Alice can never have, now. But Jane could.

  “Miss Hodgson,” says Auden, “I have never told you that I once knew a woman who looked exactly like you.”

  He’s picked an odd time for small talk.

  “I have almost asked you, many times, if you might have a twin sister,” Auden continues. “But then I remember that this woman was, in 1780, older than you are now. Not to mention living in America.”

  “I have never been to America, I’m afraid. What was her name? Perhaps she was from a branch of the same family.”

  “I never knew her name. She was a supporter of the rebels. She came one night with a few other women to tend to the wounded. This was near Charleston. The colonel in charge was a . . . well, let us say he was a hard man. He ordered us to do something which would have haunted my dreams forever, if I had been forced to carry it out. To shoot the women in cold blood, as they tended to the dying.”

  “He changed his mind?” Jane asks.

  Alice stands still, like a frightened rabbit, afraid that if she moves, everything will change and this truth will vanish. The truth that this woman was Jane. Jane was there, in America. And that means Jane goes on to use the device in her hands. It means Prudence fails.

  Doesn’t it?

  “No,” says Auden. “He did not change his mind. He did not show mercy. But one of the rebel women—the one who looked just like you, Miss Hodgson—she came very near to us, bravely, and said something to one of her companions about a nearby British camp being aflame. Grateful for an excuse not to carry out our orders, we turned and rode to help our compatriots. When we got there, the camp was perfectly well. That woman saved her own life and those of the women around her. And I have often reflected that she saved my soul as well, or at least saved whatever piece of it might survive that terrible war.”

  Alice only now realizes that she has been gripping the edge of Jane’s worktable.

  She wants to weep, and does not trust herself to breathe. She may have no faith in humanity but by God, she has faith in Jane.

  “I am perhaps too sentimental,” Captain Auden says, too brightly, as if he too is trying not to betra
y some emotion, “but in memory of that woman, I will show what little mercy I can. I give her into your care for ten minutes, Miss Hodgson. Then she can say her farewells to her father, with me.”

  “Thank you,” says Jane prettily. She does not know, does not suspect, that Captain Auden just told her the story of how he met her in America years ago, when she was older than she is now.

  Or perhaps she does. Jane is always one step ahead, although she seems to stand still.

  Auden steps toward Alice and speaks softly. “And because I was in the war with your father, I will do this for him, too.”

  “For Jane, then, and for my father. And not for me.”

  He looks down. “You know I have a great deal of regard for you. If our lives had gone differently—”

  She puts her finger to her mouth, so that Jane will not have to hear any declarations. “I don’t ask anything from you, Captain, other than these ten minutes. It will be a rush, to get this body into stays and stockings and gown in that time, but we’ll manage it. For you.”

  He attempts a smile, and steps back. Jane is watching him, her lips thin. She is not watching Alice, as though she cannot bear to. Oh God, she’s lost Jane. Alice is lost.

  But Jane—Jane goes on.

  Auden stands at the door, and then turns. “And Miss Hodgson, you may be wanted at the magistrate’s as well. To explain how Miss Payne was able to secure one of your creations. Without your knowledge, I am sure.”

  Bless him.

  “Captain Auden,” Alice says loudly, “I have been pondering a question. And since it seems I shall never have the pleasure of asking it at a salon, would you give me your answer?”

  He raises an eyebrow. “A question.”

  “Yes. A question. If you think of all the great mysteries of the past—the man in the iron mask, say, or the murder of the princes in the tower. If you had some way to find out the truth of these mysteries, would you? Or do you think it is best that some things remain hidden to all, now that all hope of justice has passed?”