by Ian Whates
“When I’m king,” boy Morris said out loud, and got smacked again. “I’ll have your head cut off,” retrotemporal Morris finished for him, and then shouted it. And then the scene was gone, and he was somewhere else. A supermarket. The kid at the checkout counted items into the bag and said something unintelligible and reversed, and the customer wandered into the aisles to shelve the goods.
Morris wondered if he might just fall back as far as his own birth. Maybe he’d be reborn as himself but with all his memories and he could go through school again but with all the knowledge he had now. He’d still fail his exams, probably, but he’d be very cool and he’d know the future, so that wouldn’t really matter. He’d either shop his parents to the law or cut some sort of deal with them, blackmail them. Deal drugs and get money to hire men to sort them out. There were options, once you knew you didn’t have to take that sort of thing.
But why birth? That was sort of arbitrary, when he considered it. Conception was probably more like it. Maybe when he reached the moment of his conception (yuck!) he’d just fade away, sort of spool himself up and never have existed at all. He considered whether this would count as dying and decided it was somehow worse.
Shit.
He struggled for a while, trying to figure out what he could hold onto which would let him claw his way forwards. He pictured himself climbing up a deep well of time back to the lab. He made pitons in his mind, hammered them into the walls and struggled against the current. It didn’t help.
He passed the moment in question and nothing happened. That was slightly anticlimactic, and also a bit good because it meant he hadn’t vanished into his own past self or disintegrated, but it was also a bit alarming because now there was really nothing to stop him falling and falling. Would he just run out of steam and get bumped out of time in the Middle Ages? The Cretaceous? Into space before there was a planet? The Middle Ages would be okay, he was up to date on his vaccinations and he knew cool stuff about engineering which would seem a little bit magical. A lot magical. He could set himself up as Merlin and live a pretty good life. Maybe he could start a school, find some real genius peasants and one of them could work out how to unstrand him. Maybe being sent back through time like this would give him miraculous powers. He’d be a god back here, a superman, he could joust and throw fire with his hands and rule the world and change everything so that Morris Ruddle would be the inheritor of the entire planet.
He fell through the time of Henry VIII, William the Conqueror, Julius Caesar. He fell on and on back through people who didn’t have names because they didn’t have language. He fell through dinosaurs and fish and amoebae and fire and then sat in space for a really, really, really, really, really, really long time. Or whatever it was when he was flying backwards through time. It couldn’t be time, really, could it, because that was going the other way? Subjective time, for sure. He wondered if he was aging. Would he get hungry or thirsty? Could he starve while he was falling like this? His watch was broken again, which was probably not surprising. It was negative several billion years old, and it hadn’t been an expensive watch to begin with.
He sat there and waited. He got very bored indeed. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he was probably bored for longer than he’d been alive, longer than the entire human race had been alive, longer than every individual member of the human race put together, every animal, ever, had been alive, in total.
But maybe that was just how it felt because he had literally no points of reference at all.
And then he saw the beginning, and wondered if he was going to die now, hitting the beginning of time. He was aware that he might be going a bit mad, because he was so bored, and he was also aware that for the first time ever he wondered whether it would be so bad to stop existing, because he didn’t know what else to do.
He saw the beginning coming at him: the biggest frying pan ever, a slap for being insolent, a car crash. He flinched, and fell and fell and fell. And fell.
He hit it.
The beginning of time was bouncy, like a giant, frictionless bouncy castle or a bouncy bed like the one in the hotel he had been to with Maria before she told him he wasn’t the man for her. He hit the strange, springy surface again and again and bounced again and again. And again and again and again. Now he was bored and jostled by hitting the beginning of time and the universe and matter and all that, and a bit nauseous. Very nauseous.
Great. You could get motion sick from hitting the beginning of time. It was a little bit typical: Morris had never really gotten motion sick except a few times when he was trying to kiss Maria in a taxi, and once on a boat in Spain, also kissing. That seemed to be the only time his brain got confused about motorised travel. Which sucked.
But now, now, here he was, shot with a Time Gun, hitting the beginning of time and bouncing off it and of course he was going to feel like throwing up. He wondered what would happen if he did. Would he bounce around in atemporal vomit for ever? Would an angel come and give him a stern talking-to for messing up the Creation? Where was God, exactly, in all this? Was God behind the squishy meniscus of time? Was that why he couldn’t get through it? Bounce, lurch, bounce, lurch, is God in there? Hello? Bounce, lurch. Bounce. Lurch. Oh, oh, oh, no.
He threw up.
Absolutely nothing happened at all.
And then it did.
It was like dancing rock and roll at your fourteenth birthday party when you spin around and then you accidentally let go and your sister flies across the room and lands on the goldfish bowl and the goldfish lands on the back of the TV and the TV blows up and the goldfish dies and you get hit really hard with a shoe for messing up the house and costing us a fortune but you sort of feel you deserved it because wow but really you didn’t mean to and you never really knew what right and wrong was after that because it all seemed so totally capricious and a bit strange.
Which... is the first thing he sees when he slows down. He sees that whole unhappy business and for a moment he knows, absolutely knows in his heart of hearts that he’s going to bounce off the end of time, the opposite end, and then go back, and then forward, until he is misshapen and exhausted and then the final act of the Time Gun is going to be to put his soul inside that goldfish and he’s going to explode himself accidentally and wouldn’t that make it an Irony Gun?
And then he thinks, no, thank God, that’s just crazy talk. And flies forward through time.
Morris Ruddle flies forward through time. It’s better in this direction because everything makes sense and words aren’t backwards. It’s also worse because he can see every crappy choice he ever made and a whole bunch of the ones other people made and he’s sort of getting an education here, getting a bit wise. It occurs to him that maybe with this newfound wisdom he will solve some of the world’s problems. He wanders around a bit checking out how governments work and reckons they don’t. They’re just a room full of confused people making it up as they go along, which is a bit scary. He watches sub-prime loans get out of control and frankly isn’t impressed. It’s as if no one’s paying attention at all except him. He sees wars and executions and a great number of other people having sex and he passes through the moment when he gets hired to steal the Time Gun and he thinks for a moment that he might be slowing down.
He is slowing down.
He is, he’s definitely not going to make it to the far end of time at this rate. He’s going to stall out any moment now. He feels strange and papery and he looks at his hands. They are very, very, very, very, very old.
The universe goes: “pop”.
And he stands in the lab again, staring at his ancient, wrinkled old hands and thinking that it is very unlikely that he will ever have any sort of sex again. And then Morris Ruddle comes in, young Morris, and like an incredible arsehole he goes right for the place where he got shot with the Time Gun and Morris realises that unless he can stop this from happening young Morris will get shot and end up as old Morris, but if he can prevent the whole thing something else can hap
pen, even if it’s just a little different it could be so much better, and his heart is fluttering and maybe giving up and he says “no, no, no,” and lunges forward with the nearest thing to his hand.
Which is the Time Gun, and he realises this just as he pulls the trigger and thinks “oh, sod it” because now he’s created a recursion or maybe there always was one and he’s going to go around and around in this loop for ever, so he turns the gun around and shoots himself, too, goes zinging back along the same loop to intercept young Morris somehow, tell him to do things differently, and around and around and around they go, more and more Morrises making the loop tighter and tighter and tighter and getting shot more and more often with the Time Gun and he starts to wonder if there can possibly be enough energy in the greater universe to sustain this many iterations. And then he finds he is face to face with the many many iterations, perfectly balanced all along the endless line of himself, and out of sheer amazement he does the last thing in the world he ought to do.
He pulls the trigger on the Time Gun.
All of him.
And thinks: “this can’t be good.”
PROFESSOR MORRIS RUDDLE stares down at the dead burglar and wishes he had thought to pick up almost any other device from his workbench. The heavy battery pack would have made a quite excellent bludgeon, for example.
He consoles himself, staring down, with the thought that it must have been very quick. He calls the chief of campus law enforcement, Detective Morris Ruddle, who in turns calls Morris Ruddle the coroner to come and pronounce the boy dead. None of them sees anything unusual about this. Professor Morris Ruddle wonders if he will be put on trial. He knows a good lawyer – Morris Ruddle – and he has faith that a jury of twelve Morris Ruddles will see it his way.
He sits, and waits.
OUTSIDE, IN THE universe, Morris Ruddle expands to fill the available space.
WHEN THOMAS JEFFERSON
DINED ALONE
KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH
Kristine Kathryn Rusch has won two Hugos, a few Asimov’s Readers awards, an AnLab award, and a couple of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers awards – and that’s just in recent years. Her novels have hit the USA Today bestseller list, the Wall Street Journal and Publisher’s Weekly lists, and the extended list of the New York Times. She’s also had bestsellers in Great Britain and France. All her fantasy novels, including the seven volumes of the popular Fey series (with more planned) have recently been reissued. She’s currently writing two science fiction series set in the Retrieval Artist universe and the Diving universe respectively, two mystery series as Kris Nelscott, two goofy fantasy romance series as Kristine Grayson, and one strange futuristic romance series as Kris DeLake. She is also editing the new anthology series, Fiction River. No wonder she never leaves her house...
1.
“I SIT HERE in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and work on speeches – all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth – I can just imagine old Andy [Jackson] and Teddy [Roosevelt] having an argument over Franklin [Roosevelt]. Or James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce deciding which was the more useless to the country. And when Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur join in for place and show, the din is almost unbearable. But I still get some work done.”
President Harry S. Truman
in a letter to his wife Bess
June 12, 1945
“MARY TODD LINCOLN is holding séances in the White House.” Ambra Theeson stood just inside the office door, clutching a small research tablet so hard that her right hand was shaking. “And I think it’s our fault.”
Professor Kimber Lawson looked up from her desk. She pulled off her glasses – an affectation because no one needed glasses any longer, but an affectation she loved. She set them on the three-hundred-year-old partners desk her former husband had bought her on their honeymoon in Maine.
Ambra sounded close to tears, but there was no trace of them on her moon-shaped face. Ambra had always been a bit of a drama queen, even on her very first day of her very first 100-level class, more than eight years ago.
Kimber wished her book-lined office was bigger. Or that she had brought some of the oldest tomes to her apartment, rather than leave them here as an impressive (if out-of-date) tribute to her profession. Because, right now, even with the door open, Ambra was too close.
“Mary Todd Lincoln,” Kimber said in the most patient tone she could muster, “was well-known for her spiritualist tendencies.”
“But there’d been no evidence of séances,” Ambra said.
Kimber wondered if there was evidence of them now. Ambra had passed the personality tests – necessary requirements for someone who wanted to tackle Living History as a discipline. But those tests examined her ability to tolerate delayed gratification. If Ambra hadn’t been able to sustain research over several years with no result whatsoever, she wouldn’t be in this program.
Kimber now believed the tests were inadequate. Ambra was a case in point. She was disciplined, all right, but she was also prone to making wild conclusions based on next to no evidence, something that the department hadn’t thought of testing for, at least not three years ago when Ambra applied full time.
After all, Living History was still a new discipline – less than twenty years old, barely long enough for revisionists to appear. (And, in Kimber’s opinion, those who had didn’t really count.) Everyone was still trying to figure out what was needed, who the best scholars were, and what scholarship actually meant in the modern era.
“Perhaps people knew about the séances, but never made a note about them,” Kimber said. “I mean, why else would we believe that Mary Todd Lincoln had spiritualist tendences?”
Kimber truly couldn’t remember, which only made her more annoyed at Ambra. The chair of the Living History department shouldn’t be seen as ignorant about the Lincolns. Lincoln remained, two centuries after his death, the most studied president in American history.
“Because she kept seeing Willie’s ghost in her bedroom after he died,” Ambra said in that tone people use when they think someone else should know something. “She never tried to summon him.”
Kimber assumed that Willie was the dead son, but she couldn’t remember when or how he died. And wasn’t there another named Tad?
“Do we know for certain that she never tried to contact him?” Kimber asked.
“Yes, we know that for certain,” Ambra said with a little too much force. She still clutched the tablet, but now she was watching Kimber like Kimber had grown two heads. “We know more about Willie’s death and its impact on both Lincolns than we know about almost anything else. I mean, they were in the White House at the time, and the number of servants and assistants and –”
“I mean,” Kimber said, “do we know for certain that Mary Todd Lincoln held no séances?”
“Yes,” Ambra said. “We do.”
“Because,” Kimber said over her, “we learn that all sorts of things we thought were true weren’t when we travel back and observe. And vice versa, of course.”
Ambra actually rolled her eyes, which Kimber thought horribly unfair. She’d wanted to roll her eyes at Ambra for nearly eight years now and, so far, she had restrained herself from doing so.
“We’ve been visiting the Lincolns for more than two decades and no one, no one, has seen a séance in the White House. And it makes sense.” Ambra was now waving the tablet at Kimber as if the tablet held the truth. “I mean, think about it. If the Lincolns had held séances in the White House during the Civil War, the muckraking press would have been all over them. It would have reflected badly on them and –”
“I understand,” Kimber said as calmly as she could. So she had shown her ignorance. At least she’d shown it to Ambra, whom everyone else found as annoying as she did. “But my earlier comment still remains. Sometimes presidents do manage to keep secrets, even from the press.”
“Not something like this,” Ambra said. “There would’ve been too many people involved.”
Kimber closed her eyes, because otherwise she would look up to the heavens and shake her head. The day had already been a long one – she’d had to organize everything from next year’s schedule to the waiting list for next month’s historical visits – and she really didn’t want to spend time with her most difficult student.
Nor did she want to explain something to Ambra that Ambra should have already known: Presidents kept major secrets all the time, secrets that were closely held by dozens of others, from staff to compatriots to members of the opposition party. A lot of those secrets got lost to history in the days before time travel. Now, those secrets were being recovered and revealed.
Once upon a time, Kimber used to think the revelations were the most exciting part of her work. Now she was so tired, she doubted she would ever use the word ‘exciting’ again.
Kimber made herself open her eyes and pretend interest. “How did you find out about the séances?”
“It showed up in the Wikipedia listings,” Ambra said.
Kimber barely managed to keep from laughing in surprise. “And what were you doing on Wikipedia?”
That old creaky thing had existed as long as Kimber could remember, and no serious scholar used it. It was for school children and the occasional pedant who was giving a speech.
The site would probably vanish sometime soon. It was already losing its importance. People preferred to watch their history live, in snippets, and if they were going to make some kind of presentation, they now clipped the actual scholarly visitation and presented the quote or the moment on screen so that everyone could see both its veracity and its historical beauty.
And Kimber did mean beauty. The elegance of the Living History work kept her in this chair. She loved everything from accurate scholarship to the videos of actual historical events. Young scholars could watch major moments through protected observation portals (Windows Into The Past, the manufacturers called them), but the true scholars, the ones who wanted to dedicate their lives to discovering what actually happened during an event or even a war, would show up and observe in real time, unnoticed by the subjects themselves.
