Now, Then, and Everywhen (Chronos Origins)

by Rysa Walker

  “We should definitely eat now,” Jack says. “I grabbed this from that place you like over near campus, since they don’t deliver this far out. And the package only guarantees it will stay warm for half an hour.”

  I hadn’t really thought I’d be hungry. The lump that took up residence inside my stomach after Lorena’s visit felt too large to allow much room for food. But exercise seems to have worked up my appetite, and the pizza smells wonderful.

  Jack is acting a bit odd, though. He keeps giving me nervous looks as we eat, and he’s making small talk about his classes and the history department. That’s something he can barely tolerate in others and never does himself. Which has me wondering if he already knows. Lorena promised she wouldn’t tell anyone, but I doubt that promise included RJ. And since Alex is RJ’s cousin, and Jack is Alex’s roommate . . . I think it’s within the realm of the possible that he already knows, but he’s sworn not to rat out the person who told him.

  He tops off our wine and says, “So . . . Lorena told me you were upset but wouldn’t say why. Wouldn’t even tell RJ.”

  I push the pizza aside, my appetite now shriveled. As Lorena said earlier, she’s really supposed to report this. Not just as a medical professional, but as a citizen. If you know someone is using genetic modification to take unfair advantage in education or business and you fail to report it, you can be fined, lose your job, even be confined to your dwelling. Telling Jack will put him at risk, as well.

  When I hesitate, he leans forward and takes my hand. “Lorena didn’t tell me, Madi . . . but Alex and I pieced it together. The medallion is obviously keyed to your genetics, and it doesn’t really seem like something that would occur naturally. But it will probably be okay. As long as that was the only alteration, the government will be willing to overlook it. I mean, they need someone who can operate the thing, right?”

  “But it’s not the only alteration, Jack. Lorena said there were more than a dozen changes. Baseline enhancements, I think she called them. Not to me directly, but to my parents. Or my grandparents, although I’m not even sure that type of alteration was possible when they were . . .” I trail off and then bark out a nervous laugh. “I was going to say ‘when they were born,’ but how can I even know when they were born if they passed along the genetic ability to use that key?”

  We’re both silent for a long moment, and then Jack says, “So, what are you going to do?”

  I shrug miserably. “I’m on scholarship, Jack. If this is exposed, I’ll not only lose it, but I’ll put my family at risk. Nora, my mother, Thea—they could all be in serious trouble. On the other hand, the odds seem pretty good that it will be discovered at some point in the future, and I’m now liable because I know. And so is Lorena, and now you, and Alex, and RJ.”

  He grimaces. “Which means your options are either to forget you ever found the key and hope for the best or to exploit the key to the fullest and hope that doing so will keep you out of trouble for the enhancement.”

  “That about sums it up. Neither is exactly a great choice.”

  “True. But . . . the government is going to want this technology.”

  “RJ says several governments are going to want it. He seems to think we’ll have a bidding war. And . . . to be honest, I’m more inclined to go with an international organization, or not sell an exclusive license. Do we really want any single government to have exclusive rights to this technology?”

  Jack shrugs. “Hey, like I told you, I’m from a military family, so I have a slight bias to at least restricting it to US allies. But regardless of who buys the rights, you’re the only person who can use it—or, at least, the only person to the best of our knowledge. If you leverage that, maybe you can make leniency part of the deal.”

  “Or they could hold a hefty penalty over my head—for me, my family, all of us—and force me to do whatever they want. I think that’s equally possible, don’t you?”

  “No. I don’t think they’d . . .” He stops and is silent for a long time as he looks around the basement. Then he says, “Yeah. I think that’s at least equally possible.” His voice is tight now. Angry almost. “But I’m not sure there’s a way to avoid that.”

  “Maybe the best option would be to go back and tell myself that planting a garden is a very, very bad idea. Undo the past week and make it so I never even see that orange light coming up through . . . the ground.” I stop, looking around at the basement lights. The pool lights, too. Both are the same pale amber as the ones that illuminate the library cabinets. What occurs to me now, however, is that even though the panels they’re behind mute the color, those lights are the same shade as the CHRONOS key.

  I run to the pool and dive in, ignoring whatever Jack is calling out. When I reach the deep end, I swim down to inspect the lighting panel. It’s the one that I noticed was a bit brighter, but the panel isn’t loose after all, and the light is much brighter here. I tug on it, and pry at it with my fingernails, but it is held in place with tiny screws and doesn’t want to budge.

  So I kick back up to the surface. “We need to find a screwdriver. Or something I can use as one. I’m pretty sure there’s another key down there. The lights in the pool—and also the ones upstairs in the library—are the same color.”

  We poke around for a few minutes in a small closet that holds salt and other odds and ends that are used to maintain the pool. I finally locate a small tool kit on one of the shelves. Then Jack changes into his swim trunks and we dive in.

  It takes four trips to the bottom, but we eventually manage to loosen the panel enough to push it aside and reveal a small cubbyhole. At the very back, plugged into some sort of interface, is a CHRONOS key identical to the one upstairs on my dresser. The glow seems to be amplified, like it’s powering the other lights in the pool. Jack yanks at it, but it doesn’t budge. That’s probably a good thing. I’m pretty sure we’d be in the dark if he pulled it out of its holder. The fact that it’s the same color as the lights in the library also has me wondering if that key is serving some other purpose.

  Jack is already out of breath, so he goes back to the surface. Something else catches my eye as I’m about to follow him. It’s a package encased in a clear wrapper of some sort, wedged against the side panel of the hole. The package holds several thin books, a squat vial about the circumference of a cherry tomato, and a small yellow stick that looks like a pencil. I’ve never seen one so tiny, though.

  “Books?” Jack says when I place the package on the tiles at the pool’s edge. “What kind of idiot hides books in a swimming pool?”

  “The same kind that hides a time-travel device there, I guess. They do appear to be in a waterproof wrapper, but you’re right. It’s weird. Whoever hid it clearly intended for me—or at least someone in the family—to find it.”

  “How do you figure?”

  I look back at the pool. The light at the deep end is even brighter now that the panel is attached by just the one screw. “Would you have noticed anything odd about that pool light?”

  “I can barely even tell that there are lights in the pool,” Jack says. “I mean, I see something. But it’s really dim. So you’re thinking that whoever hid this wanted it to be found by someone . . .”

  “By someone who could use it. They probably had no clue about the one buried in the garden. But that key in the pool and these books? They were left by someone in my family. My best guess would be James Coleman, since this pool was installed for his second wife. She was Nora’s stepmother, so I doubt she carried the gene to use the key. That leaves James and . . . I think, his brother? No. It was his nephew. Which would make him some sort of cousin, I guess. He lived here, too. Helped take care of Grandpa James when he was getting up in years.”

  “Could you contact him?”

  I shake my head. “The nephew was twenty years younger, and the wife he built the swimming pool for was twenty-five years younger. But Grandpa James outlived both of them. I assume that’s why the house reverted to Nora.”


  Once we’re out of the pool, I place the waterproof package on the table and extract two slim, almost identical books.

  “Looks like old diaries,” Jack says.

  “Or maybe not so old.” I run my finger along the edge of the pages. “The material is odd. Too thick to be regular paper. More like pages in a modern sketch pad, really, where you can erase or save your artwork.”

  When I flip open the cover, there’s an inscription, written in small neat letters:

  Katherine Shaw

  1890–1900

  “That’s one of my ancestors.” I point at the name inside the diary. “Nora’s grandmother’s grandmother. She was the original owner of this house. Well, not the original original owner, I guess, but the first person in my family who owned it. And she was alive in the 1990s, not the 1890s.”

  “Sounds like you might have inherited a certain ability from your great-great . . .” He laughs. “How many greats would that be?”

  “Four. Although, Katherine could just be a family name. I mean, this could have belonged to an umpteenth-great-grandmother, who actually did live in the 1890s, for all I know. That would be the more logical conclusion.”

  “In most cases, I’d agree. But I’ve seen you time travel. And I doubt a two-hundred-year-old diary would be in this good of shape, or have pages made out of whatever this stuff is . . .”

  He has a point.

  The second book also has Katherine’s name printed on the inside, with the date 1780–1790. Those words are scratched out, though. Beneath them, in a different ink and different handwriting, is a single sentence.

  Use with disk.

  And below that, a name that I recognize instantly—Nora’s grandmother Kate Pierce-Keller.

  FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID (JUNE 20, 1965)

  Reverend King Speaks to Antioch Graduates

  (Yellow Springs, Ohio) Nearly three hundred graduates of Antioch College and their families gathered on Saturday as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an address called “Facing the Challenge of a New Age.” Dr. King urged students to develop a “world perspective” and to work to alleviate poverty and hunger both in the United States and abroad. He called for an “all-out war” on poverty and for increased efforts to remove any remaining vestiges of discrimination and segregation. In addition, he noted the need to take the final steps toward ensuring voting rights for Negroes in the South.

  While King has generally focused on domestic issues, Saturday’s message to the graduates also had international themes, touching on nuclear disarmament, the war in Vietnam, and the need to strengthen the United Nations.

  Accompanying Dr. King was his wife, Mrs. Coretta Scott King, who attended Antioch College in the 1940s.

  ∞11∞

  TYSON

  YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO

  JUNE 19, 1965

  I grab an armful of folding chairs from the back of the large white delivery truck and join the student volunteers who are setting up the wide stretch of lawn where commencement will be held. One of the first tricks you learn as an agent is that people are far less likely to question whether you belong if you keep yourself busy at whatever communal task is at hand. With that in mind, I jumped in early, using the stable point that I’d set up on a preliminary trip to scout out the area, and lined up with the other volunteers. A skillfully forged student ID is in my wallet if anyone actually does question me, but that seems unlikely given the number of people who will be arriving in the next hour. The Antioch College class of 1965 is the largest yet, with nearly three hundred graduates, and they’re expecting all of the fifteen hundred invited guests to attend, since the college announced that Martin Luther King would be giving the commencement address.

  King’s speech also means that there will be a sizable security detail in addition to campus police. A near-fatal stabbing in 1958 forced him to take personal safety seriously. There were multiple death threats against him this year alone. It’s been almost a year since three civil rights activists, two of them brothers of Antioch students, disappeared in Mississippi while working to register black voters. Their bodies were found weeks later in a shallow grave. Malcolm X was assassinated back in February. Earlier this year, police in Selma, Alabama, beat down a crowd of nearly six hundred peaceful marchers with clubs and tear gas. Several deaths occurred in the aftermath.

  But despite the ongoing violence in the summer of ’65, there have been recent victories, too. Many of the students on this campus took part last summer in an ultimately successful effort to desegregate a local barbershop, and some have arrest records to prove it. The Civil Rights Act was signed last July. In December, Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And finally, the Voting Rights Act passed the Senate and was just voted out of committee in the House of Representatives, in part due to public reaction to the death of two white civil rights activists during the protests surrounding the Selma march.

  It’s a beautiful morning to reflect on those victories, with clear skies above and just the hint of a breeze. You can almost feel hope and optimism in the air. I guess that could be normal for a college graduation, though. This is my first, so I don’t really have a point of comparison.

  As ten o’clock draws closer, families drift in and begin filling the seats. The driver of the truck tosses the last of the chairs to me and the other three guys who are nearby, then pulls down the back door and heads back across the lawn toward the campus gate.

  Our crew of volunteers disbands once the last chairs are in place and each has a commencement program on the seat. I hang toward the back, partly because the front sections are reserved and partly because this suit is hot, and the back rows are shaded by the tall towers that rise above the pitched roof of Antioch Hall.

  Two men with rifles are on that roof now, scanning the crowd. Security guards. They were mentioned in one of the articles I read about the event. The author said there were other bodyguards on the ground as well, and I’m sure any guests sitting at the front will be under close scrutiny. That’s one reason I helped with setup—it gave me a chance to create three strategically located stable points near the front and to mount a small recording device under one of the folding chairs. This will give me extra data to pore over when I get back home, and I can still hang back in a section where I’m less likely to draw attention.

  Most of the people are looking around anxiously, either hoping to catch an early glimpse of their graduate or of Dr. King. I’m watching for King, too, although I’m also keeping an eye out for Antoinette Robinson and her family. It’s nearly ten. The band is warming up. I’m beginning to wonder if I missed her and they’re already seated. Then I see Toni, her sister, and two people who must be their parents coming in from the parking lot, almost at a run.

  Antoinette’s gaze slides right past me, and I feel a momentary wave of disappointment. Which is all kinds of stupid. The event that caused her to remember me is clearly after the ceremony, in the parking lot, and I still have absolutely no idea what I could possibly do to help her dad with his car. Maybe I follow Timothy and Evelyn’s advice and go call this Triple A place? Except . . . that’s a conundrum, because I wouldn’t have even asked the two of them about 1960s car repair if I hadn’t already spoken to Toni about it.

  Two couples change seats so that the Robinson family can sit together. The four of them collapse into wooden chairs one row in front of me with an almost audible sigh of relief as the processional begins and the graduates begin to make their way down the aisle toward the empty seats cordoned off at the front.

  When the music ends, someone steps up to the podium to lead a prayer. Several short speeches and songs follow. I don’t pay much attention to this first part of the ceremony. If there’s something I miss, I can always review the event from the stable points I set up. My eyes keep drifting toward Toni Robinson, who sits at the end of the aisle, next to her little sister. They both look bored, and the younger one is fidgety to the point that their mom taps the girl’s knee with her rolled-up
commencement program and gives her a stern look.

  But once Reverend King is introduced, everything else fades into the background. King is here, at least in part, as a thank-you to Antioch for the scholarships given to his wife, Coretta, and her older sister, when the two women attended the school in the late 1940s. Other historians seem to have largely overlooked this speech, possibly because it was those family connections that brought him here. If this were one of King’s better-known speeches, I’d almost certainly see at least a few dots of purple light in the crowd today, because I wouldn’t be the only agent to have made this trip. I think there’s also a good chance, if this were considered a major speech, that the board would have wanted me to have a few more years of experience under my belt before approving the jump.

  Major speech or not, I’d argue that it’s kind of a turning point for King. Most of his addresses prior to this one focused primarily on civil rights inside the United States. In this speech, however, you get glimpses of his concern about the war in Vietnam and the need for nuclear disarmament, things that will become his primary focus during the final years of his life.

  I’ve read the speech, of course. Dissected it, in fact, as part of the proposal for this trip. But printed words—even the bits of audio that have survived—don’t really prepare me for exactly how powerful King is as a speaker. For the next thirty minutes, I almost forget that Antoinette Robinson is a few yards away.

  As he draws to a close, King calls not only for people of all races, but also people of all religions, to work for peaceful coexistence. The speech ends, as many of his speeches do, with the words of the spiritual, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last,” and then King takes a seat so that they can get on with the task of handing out diplomas.

  It’s a slow, plodding process. When they reach the names beginning with Y, I quietly exit and head toward the parking area to be sure that I don’t lose the Robinson family in the crush to greet the new graduates. Again, that concern feels stupid, because I already have some clues about what’s going to happen. Assuming, of course, that having this advance knowledge didn’t make me do something different.