The Collectors

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Unfortunately, this diverted just enough of the earlier Jena’s attention that it enabled the earlier Noi to get the edge in their battle. Struggling to get out from the later supervisor’s grip, Jena watched in horror as the earlier supervisor caught the earlier agent by her braid, spun her viciously around, and snapped her neck with a crack that resonated through the corridor like the report of an antique firearm.

  The death of her younger self had no existential effect on Jena now, for the timestream had already branched. But it certainly had an emotional impact. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a copy of herself die, but it was a sight that never got any easier. The fact that another version of herself had been the killer sickened her even more.

  And now it was two against one, and the backstepped supervisor took advantage of her shock to get her in an immobilization hold. “I told you that braid was a bad idea,” she hissed in her own ear.

  The other Noi—the murderer—swaggered toward them. “Don’t worry, we still have one of you to merge with,” she said. “You know, I never thought I’d enjoy killing myself, but that felt surprisingly good. You smug pretender, acting like you’re so much more real and righteous than the rest of us.”

  “You shouldn’t even exist!” Jena snarled at her, at them. “Is this who you wanted to be growing up? A killer, trapped in an endless war? Is this the kind of future you saw for yourself when Mama taught you about the Federation’s great history and the honor of serving it?”

  “I fight for the Federation! We’re stronger now, better protected! We erase our enemies, we don’t hide from them.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Jena insisted. “It never does. You’re a time agent—study your history! When has any society ever been truly defeated by force? That just makes them angrier, more driven to fight back. Why should they love their heritage, their identity, any less than you do? Why should they be any less determined, any less capable of fighting to protect it at all costs?

  “All you’ve done is make your enemies more dangerous. You’ve put your own reality, your own people, under greater threat.”

  The Noi holding her from behind tightened her grip angrily. “You don’t even want my reality to exist.”

  “Because it’s a mistake. A mistake I made that’s created unimaginable suffering. Things shouldn’t be this way. We shouldn’t be this way. You believe you’re fighting for peace and protection, but you’re not. I’ve seen a peaceful, protected Federation, and this isn’t it, my sister.” She turned her head back and forth, trying to catch both Nois’ eyes. “Just let me show you. Open your minds, let us connect. Let’s experience each other’s realities, each other’s lives, and decide which one we’d rather merge into.”

  The standing supervisor knelt before her. “Why bother? In a moment I’ll know everything you know, and you’ll no longer exist.” She looked at her own counterpart. “Hold this bitch still and get ready to merge down.” Noi smirked. “I’ve always wanted to try a three-way.”

  One Noi’s arms tightened around hers while the other reached forward to touch her. . . .

  “April 11, 1868,” said Dulmur.

  “A Saturday,” Lucsly replied. “Edo Castle is surrendered to Imperial Japanese forces, ending the Tokugawa Shogunate.”

  “Umm, December 18, 2127.”

  “A Thursday. First successful warp drive test in the Bolarus system.”

  “January 18, 1452.”

  “Gregorian or Julian?”

  “What, you think I’m an amateur? Julian.”

  “A Tuesday.”

  Before Lucsly could elaborate, the cell door opened and Jena Noi stepped in. But Lucsly immediately discerned that it was not the Jena Noi they knew. Her short hair, her TIA uniform, her arrogant swagger: This was clearly an alternate, the one native to this quantum history.

  “I assume I don’t need to introduce myself,” this Noi said. “Come on, we have some more questions for you about the obelisk.”

  “Where’s our Jena Noi?” Dulmur challenged.

  “You don’t have to worry about her anymore. Come on.”

  Her tone made it clear that it was not a request. The DTI agents traded a look. They were bureaucrats, not fighters. And despite Noi’s lissome build, she was stronger than both of them put together. All they could do was follow her instructions.

  Director Daniels (or whatever his real name was) stood watching, accompanied by a male Vulcan guard, as Noi led them out into the corridor. “This is futile,” he said. “These fossils don’t know anything.”

  “That’s what my—heh—better half wanted us to think.” Noi tapped her head. “But she’s got no secrets from me anymore. These men have important information, even if they don’t know they have it.”

  “I’m not happy that you jumped the gun, Supervisor. We could’ve used her.”

  “She left me no choice. Sir.”

  Dulmur threw Lucsly an alarmed look, and Lucsly nodded in acknowledgment. They’d seen uptime agents, including Jena Noi, undergo quantum merging with alternate selves before. In those cases it had been with accidental alternates only recently diverged, whereas these two Nois had been separate their entire lives, no doubt with resultant physical differences accumulating. It would not be as easy to achieve a quantum merge between two physically distinct bodies. But it sounded like thirty-first-century technology was up to the task.

  Which meant that the Jena Noi he knew—the Jena he had known for most of his career and owed more to than he could ever express—was effectively dead. And these agents had killed her.

  Lucsly began thinking very, very carefully about what he could do to make them pay.

  But once they passed a corridor junction, there was a burst of phaser fire (or the uptime equivalent) and the Vulcan fell stunned. The short-haired Noi whirled on Daniels and stunned him herself. Lucsly saw Dulmur gaping in delight and relief, and he turned to see Jena Noi—his Jena Noi, complete with that gloriously impractical braid—coming forward to stand alongside her counterpart. “Oh, I have never been so happy to see a time paradox,” Dulmur gasped. Lucsly just held his Jena’s gaze and gave her a nod with the barest hint of a smile. She beamed back at him warmly.

  “No time for reunions,” the local Noi said. “We have to get to the obelisk before they raise the alarm.”

  The DTI agents hurried after the two Nois. “She said you’d been absorbed,” Dulmur said to the more familiar one.

  “I almost was,” Jena said, giving her other self a look.

  The short-haired Noi returned it, looking sheepish. “We had her— I had her at my mercy. But . . . let’s just say I saw myself do something awful. If I’d been the one to do it, there would’ve been no going back. But seeing it from the outside made me realize I still had a chance to avoid it. So I . . . stopped myself . . . from merging your Jena down and decided to meld minds with her instead. I saw the life she’s led, the world she’s protecting.” She blinked away tears. “It’s better than this. It lets me be better. If only one of us gets to be Jena Noi, it should be her.”

  Dulmur spoke for both men. “I don’t understand half of that, but it sounds good to me. So what’s our next move?”

  “All this started because of my mistake with the obelisk,” Jena said. “Our only chance is to ride it back to its origin and hope we can understand what we find there well enough to fix things.”

  “Our chance?” Lucsly asked. “You realize what you’re proposing.”

  She threw him an affectionate glare. “This is no time to be a stickler, Lucsly. You’re the only allies I’ve got right now, so I’ve got no choice but to throw out the rule book and take you much, much farther uptime.”

  “Look at it this way,” her harder-edged counterpart said: “Where you’re going, you’ll all be about equally behind the times.”

  Jena gave her other self a look. “You’re not coming with
us?”

  “I need to run interference here, if I can. Try to stop them from pursuing you uptime.”

  The short-haired Noi led them into the TIA’s research facility. In a way it reminded Lucsly of the Eridian Vault, for it stored a variety of temporal artifacts. But instead of simply being secured, these artifacts were evidently in the process of being studied and disassembled. The goal here was to master the use of the artifacts, no doubt for the purpose of rewriting history at will.

  In short, this was Lucsly’s personal hell.

  The local Noi led them into the bay containing the obelisk, where it stood surrounded by scanners but apparently unaltered as yet. Guards ran toward them, but the two Nois did something the DTI men could barely discern, moving extremely fast. For some moments it seemed there were more than two of them.

  But then Jena appeared before the DTI men and drew them forward. “Obelisk, now! She’ll hold them off!”

  Jena dragged them to the obelisk at such speed that Lucsly could barely retain his footing. She pulled them down as a phaser beam shot over their heads, and they crouch-ran the rest of the way, finally dropping down with their backs against the obelisk, using it as cover. “Keep them at least fifteen meters away!” Jena called to her other self. Working her sleeve controls, she spoke in more normal tones: “Same drill as before. I’m damping its fields. Get ready for a ride.”

  Dulmur craned his neck to peer around the obelisk. “Is she winning?”

  “No more time!” Jena cried. “Here we go!”

  The obelisk unfurled and the blinding blue light engulfed them once again.

  IX

  * * *

  May 4, 2384

  DTI Headquarters, Greenwich, European Alliance

  “It sounds to me,” Clare Raymond said, “that you’ve already convinced yourself your decision was the right one.”

  The Temporal Displacement Division counselor studied Teresa Garcia, who sat in the armchair across from her in her Greenwich office. The coffee table between them, an understated piece from the mid–twenty-first century, was adorned with a few small bits of statuary from still earlier eras. The placid-hued walls of the office were also adorned with antiques, nothing less than two hundred years old, and its small window looked out across Park Row at the National Maritime Museum, its vantage low and narrow enough to conceal the view of central London’s towering skyscrapers to the northwest. The setting was designed to instill comfort in the people Clare counseled, people displaced into the twenty-fourth century by temporal accidents or, as in her own case, long-term cryogenic stasis. Clare herself had long since come to embrace the modern era as a vast improvement over the late twentieth century in which she’d been born, but she still had great sympathy for those who struggled to adjust to an era not their own. She remembered her sessions with Garcia three years earlier, when the younger woman had been adjusting to her own displacement into a more troubled decade than the one she’d left.

  Now, though, Raymond found herself faced with the opposite problem: having to counsel those left behind. But she realized that the sense of loss was much the same: Even though Garcia occupied the same world as the one she’d known three days before, it was a world forever changed by the loss of her mentor—not to mention Lucsly, whom every DTI agent and employee had expected to be around forever.

  “ ‘Right’? I don’t know.” Garcia sighed, fidgeting in the comfortable armchair. “It was the decision Dulmur would’ve expected me to make. It was my duty. I’m not so sure that makes it right.”

  “And what do you think the difference is between those?”

  A sharp laugh. “I think we’re flailing around in the dark, Clare. We barely have a grip on how to handle time travel and its consequences. We’re just trying to cope as best we can. We put these rules in place because they give us a sense of order and stability when nothing else in this business does. But that doesn’t make it more than a comforting illusion. We don’t really know what’s right.”

  Raymond tilted her gray-blond head. “I’m not sure anybody really does, in any walk of life. We all live by a set of rules because they give our lives structure and purpose. If they work for us, usually that’s enough.” She leaned forward. “So what I’m hearing is that maybe you’re questioning whether the DTI’s rules still work for you.”

  Garcia stared. “No, I’m—I’m not thinking of quitting, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Okay.” She waited.

  “It’s really more about . . . whether we’re going about this right. We have all those resources in the Vault, all that amazing potential, and we just sit on it. We don’t act when we could. I’m—I’m not saying we should be the Time Patrol and go around fixing history or whatever. But other agencies—the Aegis, the Accordists in the future—they don’t just document temporal disasters and file reports, they go to where the problem is and they act. Hell, Starfleet makes a habit of leaping through time rifts to fix things, even though they have no clue what they’re doing half the time. We have resources that could let us do the same in a more controlled way.”

  “Resources that, well, don’t technically exist yet.”

  “But they’re there. I’ve seen them. I’ve touched them. And some are from the past, from ancient races that mastered time long ago.”

  “And still somehow managed to go extinct. Which suggests that time travel didn’t solve all their problems.”

  Garcia gave a faint laugh and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Okay, you have a point. But I just—if the Accordists are willing to send back agents with advanced time technologies, why not allow us locals to learn those technologies too?”

  “They’ve had centuries more to develop that tech on their own and figure out how to use it safely.”

  “But they’re descended from us. Somebody has to take that first step to becoming full-fledged temporal agents. Why not us?”

  Raymond tapped her chin. “Let me ask you something, Teresa: Do you have any goal in mind for this new activism other than rescuing Lucsly and Dulmur? Say we change our policies so we can bring them back. What do we do next?”

  Garcia was quiet for a while. “I don’t know. I guess I haven’t really thought it through.”

  “Okay.”

  The agent sighed. “I just miss the big guys.”

  “I know. We all do.” She leaned back in her chair, trying to convey a more relaxed attitude. “Think about this, Teresa: If Lucsly and Dulmur are in the future, then maybe they’ll get to be the kind of time agents you wish you could be. But that couldn’t happen if we went forward to retrieve them, could it? So maybe they’re . . . actually better off.”

  Garcia’s eyes narrowed and her torso shot forward. “You hesitated, Clare. You don’t believe that, do you?”

  Raymond chastised herself for letting her own doubts intrude. But the important thing was to be honest. “I’m worried about them too. We all are. To tell the truth, I think Agent Dulmur will be okay. Adjusting to a new time is rough—I don’t mean to downplay that—but it helps to form personal bonds, and Dulmur has a way of connecting to people.”

  The younger woman gave a sad smile. “I know.”

  “But I’m more concerned about Agent Lucsly. He’s such a creature of routine.” She wasn’t betraying any confidences, since she’d never had any reason to counsel Lucsly. “He’s good at defending the timeline because he resists change. And now . . .” She shook her head. “Wherever, whenever he is, all his familiar comforts and certainties will be gone. I admit, I have to wonder if he’ll be able to adapt.”

  She feared her words would increase Garcia’s anxiety, but, if anything, the agent seemed to get more confident, straightening her shoulders. “As long as they let him do temporal work, he’ll be fine. After all—he’s Lucsly.”

  “And Dulmur?”

  Garcia smiled. “As long as he has his partner . . . he’ll be fine
too.”

  X

  * * *

  Far Uptime

  Dulmur rubbed his head. The second jaunt via obelisk had taken a lot more out of him than the first. It had seemed interminable, yet somehow also wrenchingly abrupt. “Ohh, I seriously need a hot shower. And a drink. Where are we now?”

  Even Lucsly looked shaken this time. “More to the point, when are we?”

  Jena Noi was running some kind of scan on the invisible controls in her uniform sleeve. Her voice was hushed as she said, “Over twenty million years uptime. Even I’ve never been this far forward.”

  “Which rules out the Axis of Time as a possible return vector,” Lucsly said. “It terminates approximately 1.4 million years CE.”

  Dulmur turned to Noi. “I don’t suppose your built-in equipment has the power to jump us that far.”

  “I was counting on convincing the obelisk builders to help us. Or forcing them, if necessary.”

  Dulmur chuckled. “Right. We ants will force the picnickers not to step on us.”

  “Some ants have a hell of a bite.”

  Lucsly was looking around. “This is not exactly a high-technology environment.”

  Following his lead, Dulmur saw what he meant. Although it was night, he could tell that they stood in the middle of a sparse, dusty scrubland surrounded on all sides by rolling mountains, with some sharper sandstone crags piercing the landscape. He could hear the ripple of a large stream nearby, so at least there was water; but there was no trace of animal life, let alone technology or civilization, anywhere in his line of sight.