Steamrolled

by Pauline Baird Jones

  Nothing changed on the woman’s face, but Ashe felt her interest ramp up.

  “Kings and queens? Leaders?” The woman’s hard edges had softened with her interest.

  “Big events and big people, big planets are more like immoveable objects, fixed points in time.” She dug through her Earth history. “The Battle of Waterloo might be off by a few days or hours, but Napoleon will always lose. And when you mess with them, time messes you back. No, pins are the people around the people, around the places. The person you don’t notice who does the right thing at the right time, or the wrong thing at the wrong time. Who lives or dies when they are supposed to. They pin time by being consistent, predictable. So far the data supports the theory that they exist and that their function can be replicated if necessary.”

  “Necessary? If they are consistent, why would it be necessary?”

  Ashe didn’t want to answer that one, but something in her eyes pulled the words out of her mouth. “If someone came to know about these pins and did something to them, out of curiosity or malice.”

  “Or stupidity? Like time wardens doing it because they can?”

  Ashe shifted from one foot to the other, not sure why because she wasn’t a time warden and hadn’t done any pin pulling. “There are no longer time wardens in the Service.”

  A considering pause, then, “At what point does a pulled pin piss off time?”

  This conversation broke almost every time regulation written, but in an odd way it was a relief, too. “Some of its theory, some from that unwise research in the past.” Probably by the time wardens this woman hated so much. “No more than two or three pulled pins have been observed in published research.” Never believe what you’re told. She rested her hands on the console, the solid cool somehow comforting. “Even one can create instability in the stream, but it takes the right sequence of removal, or the wrong sequence, for time to reset. With practice, someone might be able to learn the proper sequence, though how they’d manage to be in position to do it—” A sense she’d said something important slowed her words and her thoughts for a few seconds. “And pulling creates an instability that can be followed and fixed.” At least that was the theory she’d been taught.

  Now the woman looked thoughtful. “Time sounds…alive.”

  And female.

  Ashe had a sense they’d both been insulted.

  “The stream does feel animate.”

  Curiosity flickered across the woman’s face before vanishing from sight. “How does a pulled time pin impact real peoples’ lives, say if someone repairs the pulling?”

  “It’s not a perfect process. There will be changes, small changes, but core events remain the same or smooth out over time.” This did not seem like a good time to mention that some people might disappear entirely from the time stream.

  “Theory or fact?”

  “A little of both.” Until now, she’d accepted what she’d been taught, that time was not impacted, in any large degree, by Service intervention. Which brought her back to never believe all you are told.

  “You think Chameleon is one of these time pins?” She leaned against the opposite console, her pose almost a mirror of Ashe’s.

  Are you sure I should tell her? Ashe got an affirmative, but still hesitated. This kind of information wasn’t available to anyone not on the Time Council—unless you were Lurch and recognized no boundaries—and she was about to tell someone in the past. If this went wrong, she could blink out of time with no warning. Faint heart and all that crap. She mentally braced and dived in. “If someone wanted to mess with time on a grand scale, time pins aren’t it. What they’d need is to find a lynch pin. You have to understand, this is all just theory, as far as I can tell, but a lynch pin—”

  “—anchors time?”

  She was quick. Ashe nodded, a bit surprised to find she hadn’t been erased.

  “How is that different from one of the—”

  “—fixed time,” Ashe supplied, mentally sorting through known theories on fixed time and lynch pins. “Our scientists believe that time flows or spins around a lynch pin. That they are not always fixed in purpose, so there is more flexibility to them and they are more responsive, or perhaps, reactive? That they will act or react in ways that instinctively are good for the time line.” If her head could ache, it would have. “It is theory heavily mixed with speculation, but scientists believe the two complement, and support, each other’s function.”

  “And if a lynch pin is yanked? In theory?”

  Ashe shifted uneasily. “Theorists speculate that it would be catastrophic if even one was removed from the time stream, but no one knows how it would manifest.”

  “But they have opinions.” The tone was dry.

  “There are three main theories.” And a host of lesser ones. “Most scientists believe that time would reset, not as violently as when someone tries to unfix fixed time, but it wouldn’t be neat or pretty. Others believe that all life would blink out.”

  “And the third?”

  “The most popular theory is that time would become fluid and malleable. That even fixed time would become…”

  “Less fixed?” Ashe nodded. “And do these theorists know how to tell a lynch pin when they see it—since the time impact would theoretically happen too fast to track?”

  “They believe a lynch pin exists in a stable vortex.” Words wouldn’t do it. She popped up a virtual simulation between them, a representation of how time looked to her. If anyone else saw time like she did, they hadn’t mentioned it, which made this a new, and frightening, level of sharing for her, but the tremors eased some more. A good sign, even if the woman was seriously annoying. “Time is constantly in motion. There are waves and eddies, even when there is no disruption to the stream, as people make choices that impact events and each other.”

  The woman straightened, allowing a hint of fascination onto her face. “That’s what you see in the stream?” Ashe nodded. “How the devil can you tell when something is wrong?”

  It was easier to show her, so she did. The woman almost flinched back. “Oh.”

  A nudge from Lurch got Ashe back on topic. She altered the view again. “This is how it looks when time is right around someone, an ordinary someone.” Time was never still, because people weren’t still. In some ways it looked like movement through water, but the swirls and eddies were smaller. Time passed through them and around them in individual patterns that still had some consistency of presentation. Fixed time looked like its description, immoveable objects in the stream, but the colors were dull, a kind of tan, with sluggish movement at the edges. Impact by others was minimal, but their impact on others was constant and substantial. As soon as the stream was clear of fixed time, it would flare bright red and yellow and smelled a bit volcanic.

  “As I showed you before, wrong time looks like this,” she altered the view, “though how it looks is only part of how I know. It also feels, smells, sounds off.” Light and dark were part of time and tiny fractures could also be present.

  “And a time pin?”

  Ashe almost enjoyed the level of interest, the sense of equals sharing data. Almost. She changed the sim. “You understand this is not established time science.” There was no recorded science for how she saw time, just some written accounts and theories. She suspected she’d seen a pin on her last operation and Lurch agreed, but she had only the different way time moved around the person, and her own instincts, as a guide. What she’d seen was a hybrid between normal people and fixed time. At their heart, as time moved through a pin, there’d been a sort of vortex inside them, one that rippled their surface, but not beyond. The color was in the blue range and it smelled earthy, a bit musty. “Service trackers tend to identify pins by what happens after they are pulled, by the off time that manifests. They trace the disruption back to the source and attempt a repair or replace. I’ve never seen a replaced pin, so I’m not sure how time would manifest around one.”

  “Replaced pin?”

>   “The Service has had some success at inserting a replacement into time where a pin has inadvertently been removed.”

  “Inadvertently. Right.” Dry was back, as was skepticism. “But this is what a tracker sees in the stream?” The woman stepped closer to the sim, then walked around it.

  “As far as I know, I’m the only one who sees time like this.”

  “Really. What do other trackers see?”

  Lurch helped out with this sim. The woman looked startled, but Ashe felt the shock to her core. No wonder Lurch found her interesting. It was like a text version of her visual, devoid of its richness—and they only achieved this much view by virtue of the headset that came with their uniform and assistance by sentient or non-sentient nanites.

  “So you don’t know what a lynch pin looks like.”

  Ashe exchanged an internal “look” with Lurch. Are you sure? He’d already given his opinion, but this was serious sharing, and a lot of winging it. We don’t know.

  She needs to know.

  Because she is the Chameleon. Ashe didn’t expect—or get—an answer, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t as stupid as both of them seemed to think.

  The sim shifted to show how time bent around Chameleon. Through it, Ashe watched the eddies that formed at the edges of the bend but failed to penetrate. It was different from fixed time. It was both in and out of time and bright, not dull. That is unsettling.

  Lurch’s concurrence was hearty.

  “Our best scientists believe that the odds of anyone finding and identifying a lynch pin are remote. Virtually impossible.”

  “The impossible just takes longer.”

  Now Ashe knew where that particular axiom came from.

  “So what, you think Smith is after one of these lynch pins?

  Ashe stared at her, sure she’d get there by herself and she did, actual expression washing over the cold face.

  “Smith believes the Chameleon is a lynch pin?” She frowned. “Why?”

  Ashe shrugged. Was she in Smith’s head? Did that mean he saw time the way she did? Or the person running him saw time that way? “It is possible that something in the historical record made him suspect this. Or he wishes it to be so.”

  “There was something,” the woman conceded, “but not anymore. I made sure of that.”

  Here and there. Would she ever know the full story? “If he is out of real time, then he’d still know about the Chameleon.”

  “Won’t he be surprised if he finds out—” she stopped as Ashe’s brows arched.

  She was quite intelligent, Ashe could concede, though not with enthusiasm. “It would be…unfortunate if Smith captured the…Chameleon.”

  NINETEEN

  As Faustus had expected, the shrinking of his laboratory had caused it to become unstable. Earthquakes shook it, while lightning flashed against the murky sky.

  Doctor waited for him in the main research center. He’d had a real name once, something unpronounceable and ugly, rather like the Dusan race had been before their almost extinction. The remnants had been absorbed into the Gadi, then they’d all gone back to being Garradians, so they could pretend the years of war and separation hadn’t changed them. Only the Gadi had clung to their names and a portion of their past, but then they’d won. He’d studied as much of the Dusan history as he’d been able to find, identified this one as the least likely to have any kind of conscience, and the most likely to have the required skills, and collected him from an alternate reality. Faustus wasn’t surprised when Doctor proved to be both unscrupulous and brilliant. He’d been happy to leave the losing past and his real name behind him without visible regret. Of course, he’d been promised an almost endless supply of specimens to use for his experiments.

  Doctor believed he was in charge of the laboratory and in a way he was—as long as he was needed he would be allowed to be in charge. The man had lost his calm mien with the earthquakes. White showed around the Doctor’s eyes and he looked like he stank of fear. It was a good reason for Faustus to be grateful he was virtually present, not actually present.

  Odd to feel pleasure and annoyance jostling his insides. Until today Doctor had appeared oblivious to all emotion. Faustus decided he liked knowing the man could feel fear, but he was less enamored with seeing it.

  “Report.” He kept his voice curt, no problem keeping his gaze cold. He hadn’t felt anything but cold since—he cut that thought off. Now was not the time to remember.

  “There have been several malfunctions, master.”

  He appeared genuinely puzzled.

  “Of?”

  “Several specimens have become self-controlling and one automaton has ceased to function. He collapsed. Crushed one of the specimens. Not one of the pins, master,” Doctor added hastily. “One of the test subjects.”

  He frowned, trying to see past the data, trying to find a link to the time anomaly he’d observed. “Tell me what happen just before the malfunctions.”

  * * * *

  After the river turned, the not-Colonial man lead them a weary while along the East River toward the bending horizon. Emily found it odd that she felt tired. It was her dream, so she should be able to feel what she wanted, which would be not tired. The pitying looks from Robert and not-Colonial guy nipped at the edges of her certainty, but she had to be dreaming. Rivers didn’t flow backwards. As fun as it was to be time traveling to Roswell and points beyond, it just wasn’t possible. And—this invoked a further sigh—as wonderful as it was to be doing it with a guy both geeky and hot—also not within realms of her reality. The smell did give her pause. Couldn’t remember smelling her dreams, and this was well in the noxious range, but a dream was the only logical explanation. She was surprised and a bit embarrassed she hadn’t realized it sooner.

  The ground shook, as if the whole of this place had sustained a mighty blow. If Robert hadn’t been gripping her arm, she’d have tumbled into the nasty looking river. As it was, part of the bank crumbled, sending showers of clods plopping into it, and the horizon flickered, as if its power supply had been interrupted. When it flickered, she thought she saw another New York, one brighter and with more people and stuff.

  Yeah, that was normal.

  A derelict warehouse, half sunk into the riverbank, loomed in the gathering gloom of what passed for sunset. The horizon’s bend appeared to cut off part of it, which pretty much confirmed the dream reality—or unreality. She wasn’t sure which was correct.

  “How often does the river change direction?” Robert finally broke the silence that had reigned since they’d had the neck check.

  “In four-hour intervals,” not-Colonial man said, slowing to a stop a few paces away. “Wait here until I come back. If I don’t—”

  “Run?” Robert finished for him.

  “Run,” he agreed. “And if an airship or ’ton approaches…”

  “Run,” Robert said again.

  That was a bummer. She’d kind of hoped for an airship ride. She’d have to try to bend the dream that way before she woke up.

  The lightning was worse here, giving the scene a horror movie vibe that suited the downshift in her dream’s details. So far cool had dominated, but now creepy started to inch ahead. The air smelled and felt weird, very metallic and nasty, and the river was an unattractive grayish brown. The temperature hovered in an uncomfortable zone that somehow managed to feel chilly and hot, which was also creepy, but supported her dream conviction. Reality couldn’t be hot and cold. Not-Colonial disappeared into the doors hanging askew in the framed opening. That seemed creepy, too.

  Robert, who had held her hand for their clamber over bank and down dip, tugged her into the shadow cast by the looming bank. It wouldn’t hide them from a determined search, but it was better than standing in the open on the bleak riverbank. She looked at Robert, because she liked looking at him. It was probably a bad idea to spend the wait kissing on each other. Alert and attentive seemed indicated. But it was her dream. If she wanted to be inattentive and kissed, sure
ly that was her call. Robert’s brows arched, as if he sensed something.

  “I suppose he has to check necks with whoever is in there,” she offered in lieu of saying please kiss me until I wake up. She felt conflicted about trying to wake up. Despite the creepy details, she enjoyed being with Robert. It was a steampunk dream with a hot, smart guy. Reality would never measure up to this and when she woke up she wouldn’t have visitors or hope of a sign for her museum, because she wouldn’t have had the actual visitors. Kind of funny, in a not funny way, how detailed her dream had been about the bug. She’d read a lot about Roswell, so that part didn’t surprise her, but the parts in Uncle E’s original warehouse? It had felt so real, smelled so real, sounded so real, it had taken her too long to realize it couldn’t be real. She had to be dreaming, which brought her full circle back to embarrassed. The hot kisses should have clued her in. Crazy girls with crappy museums and an addiction to steampunk did not get hot kisses from “oh my darling” geek guys.

  The chuckle was louder this time. And she was staring right at Robert, so had the evidence of her eyes that it wasn’t him, though in this dream, that didn’t mean that much. In her real life, a few snickers and a mental “hello” would be significant, but in this dream world, adding a voice in her head to the mix kind of made sense. She felt an “of course there is a voice in my head” rightness about it.

  I’m Nod.

  The voice had a name. An odd name. One didn’t run into that name outside of nursery rhymes.

  It is a metaphor for our journey.

  So I’m the wooden shoe. She frowned. We. Since this was, technically, now a conversation, she couldn’t ask a question.

  The others are in Robert.

  And the others would be Wynken and Blynken.

  Do you find it challenging to never ask questions?

  Answers are still harder than not asking.

  We like questions and answers.

  Different strokes for different…folks.

  “Are you all right?” It was like the tenth time Robert had asked, but he looked so cute when he asked it, she didn’t mind. It made her tingle to know his worried look was worried for her.