The Collectors

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Dulmur exchanged a look with the other time agents. “Uhh, something like that.”

  Roddall proceeded to scan him. “Not that the drones aren’t reliable, of course, but it’s a good idea to double-check their work—even if it stings their pride a bit. Now, I’m just going to ask you a few questions to check your mental clarity. What’s your name?”

  “Dulmur.”

  “Your full name, if you don’t mind.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Marion Frances Dulmur,” he confessed.

  “Pleased to meet you, Marion. Now, what is the date?”

  Dulmur hesitated. “Thirty-fifty-one.”

  Roddall peered at him. “Do you remember what day and month it is?”

  “Doctor.” Noi stepped forward. “Perhaps you should try a different line of questioning.”

  The Arboreal finally noticed what she was wearing. Alarm flashed in his eyes, but he quickly suppressed it. “Pardon me, ma’am. I didn’t quite recognize the uniform.” He continued the examination as best he could without asking any questions requiring local or current knowledge.

  As the examination continued, Lucsly looked around at the other patients. Some of them had panels open for the doctors to examine their parts within; the police officer had not been the only android or cyborg in the crowd. Meanwhile, the little girl whom Dulmur had rescued looked on as a technician repaired her fathers’ mobile emitters, using equipment that seemed to be part of the emergency room’s standard complement.

  Finally, Roddall gave Dulmur a clean bill of health and cleared him to leave. “Although you are showing an unusual amount of uncorrected wear and tear, even some minor geriatric degeneration. If you’d like, I’d be happy to send you through the beam once more and repair that for you. Or if you wanted to consider a holoconversion, the upload process is quite painless.”

  Dulmur’s eyes widened. The offer—at least the former one—clearly tempted him. But a look from Lucsly was enough to remind him of his duty. The organ repairs he’d already had were enough of an anachronism to bring back with him to the twenty-fourth century—assuming they could get back there. “No, thanks, Doc. Like I said, I’m kind of a traditionalist.”

  The doctor glanced briefly at Noi but evidently knew better than to pry. “I understand. Good luck, Mister Dulmur.”

  Dulmur had an appraising look on his face as they left the hospital. It gave way to a grin as he jogged down the stairs. “I feel great! That—that was amazing! They just beam me up and I’m already cured. Is that a time saver or what?”

  Lucsly was just trying not to think about it. He was glad his partner was all right, grateful to the thirty-first-century medical miracle that had saved him . . . but he really, really did not want to think about it.

  III

  * * *

  May 2, 2384

  Eris

  “You’re telling me,” said Teresa Garcia, “that two senior agents disappeared from the most secure facility in the whole Federation, and nobody has a clue what happened?”

  Doctor Warain cringed at the junior DTI agent’s words, even though he towered half a meter above her raven-tressed head. “Well, clearly there was a spacetime displacement event,” he told her defensively. “The negative energy and chroniton field readings bear that out. Unfortunately, the surge was so powerful that it swamped our sensors—and since then we’ve been busy stabilizing the other artifacts triggered by the surge. Do you know that, until an hour ago, there was a vortex in Aisle F opening to the last Andorian ice age?”

  Meyo Ranjea, Garcia’s senior partner, spoke soothingly to the Vault engineer. “As long as it’s all contained now,” the tall, striking Deltan male told him. It had been over five hours since the incident. Ranjea and Garcia had been on their way to an interdimensional physics conference at the University of Alpha Centauri when word had come in, making them the nearest field agents to Eris, but it had still taken time for their transport to reverse course and warp back to Sol’s outskirts.

  “Well, yes, but now there’s a colony of ice bore worms loose somewhere in the Vault and we don’t have time to contain them. Who knows what could happen if they get out into the Eridian environment?”

  “Hey!” Garcia said. “Focus! Lucsly and Dulmur. What happened? Any idea what triggered the surge?”

  Warain grew even more nervous, something Garcia wouldn’t have thought possible. “You see, that’s the problem. Just moments after I left the observation gallery, the security feed cut out. There was . . . a kind of quantum interference I’ve seen before.”

  “Do you know its cause?” Ranjea asked.

  “Well . . . I’m not exactly supposed to know.”

  “Doctor, pardon the expression, but time may be of the essence.”

  “It’s just . . . that kind of interference shows up on the feeds . . . whenever we get a visit from, well, from uptime.”

  Garcia groaned. She hadn’t personally dealt with any of the DTI’s successor agencies yet in her fledgling career, but she knew they liked to avoid showing up on contemporary records and took steps to disable security sensors when they stopped in for an official visit. “Oh, no. So someone kidnapped the big guys into the future?”

  “We don’t know for sure,” Ranjea told her, thinking. “It stands to reason that an uptime agency may have had an interest in an artifact so powerful. Conceivably someone may have stolen the obelisk and captured Gariff and Marion when they tried to prevent it.” Garcia stared. Even after a couple of years as Ranjea’s partner, it was still strange to hear anyone refer to Lucsly and Dulmur by the first names they themselves rarely used. “But given the intensity of the temporal surge, it seems more likely that the obelisk itself caused the time displacement, perhaps triggered by some interaction with the uptime agent’s equipment. In which case it may have taken them anywhen.”

  “And the temporal interference from, well, everything that’s gone on here since the incident,” Warain went on, “keeps us from getting a clear reading on the event. We can’t calculate how far or in which direction they were displaced.”

  “Hold on, guys,” Garcia said, spreading her hands. “Think about this. We’re in a storehouse full of time machines. You’re telling me we don’t have anything that can peek back a few hours and see what happened?”

  “Most of them don’t even work,” the Vault engineer replied.

  “Which means some of them do.”

  “The spacetime metric around the event is complicated enough as it is. I wouldn’t want to step back into that mess.”

  “I’m not saying we go back. Just . . . open a crack and take a peek through. Or, failing that, there must be something in here that can track a temporal trajectory, or let us make contact with our people.”

  “Teresa,” Ranjea said, “you know we keep these artifacts here so they won’t be used.”

  “Yeah, but this is an emergency. For all we know, L. and D. could be back in the past, endangering the timeline.”

  “If anyone could manage to avoid altering the timeline—”

  “Yeah, I know, it’s those two. But accidents happen.”

  “If there had been a change, we would already know from the shielded records,” Warain told her.

  “The records are only as good as the record-keeping of the timeline they’re made in. There’s a lot that doesn’t get written down. Stuff on worlds outside the Federation, or in the distant past. Can we really take the chance? We have to try to find them.”

  Ranjea nodded his elegant, hairless head. “You’re right, Teresa. We need to contact Director Andos.”

  The 263-year-old Rhaandarite director of the DTI had been awaiting their call, so it took them very little time to reach her. The bulbous-browed, sandy-haired female, who towered well above even Warain’s height, listened thoughtfully to their suggestion and folded her hands before speaking. “I believe your instincts are
sound, Agent Garcia,” she said in her low, measured voice. “I have attempted to leave a message for the uptime agencies, but there has been no response.” Garcia frowned. Leaving messages for the future was simple; humans had been doing it since the first cave painting. Even the earliest time-fic stories had featured travelers writing letters meant to be delivered centuries later. The DTI had its own more sophisticated ways of doing the same thing with messages encoded for reception by its uptime partners in the Temporal Accords. The Accordists didn’t always answer a summons, but clearly this incident had uptime involvement already. So if they weren’t answering, that meant something was wrong.

  “I will authorize you at this point to attempt to determine the time to which Agents Lucsly and Dulmur have been taken, and in whose company. But you are not to attempt retrieval without consulting me first. And it goes without saying that you must take great care. The artifacts of Eris are not to be trifled with.”

  “You know,” Teresa Garcia said as she and Ranjea strode through the corridors of the Eridian Vault, “sometimes it can be really, really tempting to trifle with things.”

  “Careful, Teresa.” Ranjea’s warning was in good humor. “I know this is your first visit to the Vault, but try not to get too excited.”

  “Oh, you can’t tell me you’ve never thought about it. We are surrounded by time machines.” She gestured at the nearby bays, where various temporal artifacts were visible behind heavy-duty force fields. The artifact behind her in Bay D4 was rather unassuming, a low square platform that was believed to be a temporal transporter of uncertain origin. But Bay D5 held a more alluring object, a sleek angular hovercar retrofitted with a prototype temporal deflector by some ambitious twenty-fifth-century inventor who hadn’t survived its first test flight into the past. Garcia spread her arms toward it, her gray-clad shoulders brushing against the fringe of her straight black hair. “Come on, wouldn’t you love to take that baby for a spin? Or—or almost anything else in here? What DTI agent hasn’t fantasized at least once about going on a shopping spree in this place and seeing what kind of havoc they could wreak?”

  “Lucsly,” the two agents chorused, followed by laughter.

  “I mean, if anyone wanted to conquer the universe,” Garcia went on as she studied the large, perfectly spherical time capsule in D7, “this would definitely be the place to start from. Or maybe you could start out smaller. Maybe, oh, go back to the twentieth century with a pair of gravity boots and a personal force field and try to become a superhero.”

  “I think it’s been tried.”

  Garcia shook her head, her wavy blond tresses dancing across her shoulder blades. “For a Deltan, you’re such a stick-in-the-mud.”

  Ranjea knew she was joking, knowingly exaggerating both the number of functional, controllable artifacts herein and her own interest in using them. Teresa Garcia was herself a refugee from the past, flung forward fifteen years aboard the passenger transport Verity, and she had earned her invitation to the DTI by risking her life to prevent her shipmates from going back and attempting what could have been a cataclysmic alteration. He knew his partner could be relied upon to protect the integrity of history. But her decision still weighed on her, and her humor was a way of coping.

  Garcia stopped before Bay D9, the sleeves of her brown faux-leather jacket rustling as she crossed her arms to stare at the object within, an irregular, vertical black slab polished to a reflective gloss. “What do you suppose this thing is?” she asked as she admired the reflection of her slim figure.

  Ranjea crossed her arms over her ample bosom. “It’s not a vanity mirror, Teresa. You shouldn’t get too close.”

  “Oh, you’re such a big sister.” Garcia leaned forward to read the sign, brushing her red-dyed bangs aside. “ ‘Caution: Worldline destabilizer. Generates localized probabilistic and biographical discontinuities. Highly unstable—approach with caution.’ ” She looked back at Ranjea and shrugged. “I don’t feel any different.”

  “Still, you know better than to be reckless, Teri,” Ranjea told her. “What would Stewart think if you let the baby come to any harm?”

  Garcia’s hands moved protectively over her swelling abdomen, which was showing more and more as she moved through her second trimester. “You’re right. I forget sometimes. It’s still hard to believe this is real.” She had been dating Agent Peart for over two years before they had decided to take a chance on marriage and parenthood. Few DTI agents were able to make marriage work, but the two young humans hoped that keeping it within the agency would be the solution.

  “Oh, soon enough you won’t be able to forget.” The women shared a chuckle. Ranjea reflected on how fortunate it was that she’d elected to have her sex reassigned before joining the DTI. If she had stayed male, she doubted it would have been possible to partner effectively with a female human like Garcia, given their susceptibility to Deltan pheromones.

  “Assuming, of course,” Ranjea went on, growing serious again, “that you step away from the destabilizer before it has some effect on you.”

  “There you go again, Ranjea,” George Faunt growled, shaking his balding head. “Lecturing me like you’re the senior partner. I’ve got this, young lady.” The grizzled veteran stepped over to the control panel. “I’m the one who found this device, remember? Well, this particular one, at least. Sometimes I wonder how many more are out there,” he went on as he worked the controls to modify the bay’s damping field, “causing localized reality glitches and inconsistencies that nobody notices.” Ranjea smiled, admiring her mentor at work. There had been a time when it had seemed Faunt was on the verge of breaking under the existential anxieties of this job, but Ranjea had taken a chance, very carefully and delicately initiating Faunt as her lover, gambling that his maturity and the strength of their partnership would allow him to survive the experience without forming a dependency or losing his ego identity. The gamble had paid off, and ever since, he’d been a bastion of confidence and commitment, utterly dependable both in the field and in private. “There,” Faunt said after a final adjustment. “It should settle down in a moment.”

  Ranjea furrowed his brow. “How will we know?”

  Teresa Garcia shrugged, tilting her raven-haired head. “I guess we won’t know. That’s how we’ll know.” She frowned, looking back at the control panel. “How’d I know how to do that?”

  “You have good instincts. Just as I’ve always said.” The older Deltan gazed at the glossy black slab, considering the strong masculine contours of his reflection and experiencing a sense of stimulating novelty, as though the sight were unfamiliar. He recalled a time when he’d nearly chosen a different gender identity, though it had been a while since he’d wondered what he may have missed by declining that path. What had brought such thoughts to his mind now? Being male with a young, passionate human woman as his partner had posed its challenges, to be sure. But her ability to cope with her overpowering attraction to him, to transcend it and form the deep platonic partnership they now shared, had been a glorious gift, and he would not trade it for anything.

  Although she could be trying sometimes. “Ooooh,” Garcia breathed now, her dark eyes widening as she was drawn irresistibly toward the end of the corridor. Filling Bay D11, seated patiently and expectantly, was a massive, black-armored android more than twice the size of a human, on whose chest was emblazoned the text DO NOT ACTIVATE UNTIL STARDATE 100952 and the equivalent caution in other languages and dating schemes.

  Ranjea took her arm, pulling her away before her grin grew any wider. “No.”

  “But—”

  “No.”

  IV

  * * *

  Day 266, 3051 CE (a Tuesday)

  London Metrocomplex, West Eurasia

  When Jena Noi led Lucsly and Dulmur back to the plaza to secure the obelisk, she found that someone had beaten them there. Inside the cordon the London police had established, she saw several
people in ribbed black uniforms employing familiar equipment to scan the obelisk, though they were keeping the alien device out of phase for the moment, invisible to those without the proper ocular enhancements.

  But Noi noted differences in their uniforms as she drew nearer. Unlike her own garment, theirs were adorned with insignias, rank pins, and piping that gave them a more militaristic appearance. They also carried firearms at their hips. The humans noticed the discrepancy too. “Uh-oh,” Dulmur said. “Those don’t look like the kind of people who’d react too kindly to time travelers.”

  “Just stick with me, you’ll be okay,” Noi assured him. But her confidence was feigned. She’d hoped this timeline would have a Federation Temporal Agency equivalent to her own, sharing common goals and ready to help her restore her proper history (assuming her quantum scans were correct and this was an alteration of her own timeline rather than a spontaneous parallel branch). But from the look of these agents’ uniforms and their proud, assertive bearing, Noi suspected they would not want to let go of their reality easily.

  One of the agents, an unfamiliar Vomnin male, caught sight of their approach and called to the agent in charge. As the latter strode over to meet them at the cordon, Noi gradually recognized her as Serel Jeihaz, one of Noi’s own colleagues. Like the Jeihaz she knew, this one had chosen to skin her humanoid-shaped force-field envelope with a translucent blue haze rather than a simulation of organic flesh. She had given up mimicking her original Zetregan appearance two centuries ago, believing, as many holograms did, that their people should embrace their identity as artilects rather than clinging to their biological origins, if any. She kept a humanoid shape only since it was practical for interacting with humanoids and their technology. But while the Jeihaz from Noi’s reality was light and sylphlike, this one had programmed her holographic form to be nearly two and a half meters tall and powerfully built. The cloudy blue mane trailing back from her head also flowed more actively, seeming more like a flame than a languid mist. In contrast to the translucency of her holoskin, the uniform she manifested appeared as solid and militaristic as those of her subordinates.