Now, Then, and Everywhen (Chronos Origins)

by Rysa Walker

  There’s a muffled oof as one of the little kids running along the sidewalk crashes into a portly middle-aged man standing a few people away. Someone says, “Mind where you’re going, Davy Crockett,” and I get a brief glimpse of the odd fur hat as the man jerks backward, shoving into the two people next to him, who, in turn, shove into me.

  My foot slips off the edge of the curb, and I tumble onto the road.

  I catch myself with my forearm. My first thought is that I’m going to have a nasty scrape. Then I hear brakes squealing, and my second thought is that a scrape is going to be the very least of my worries. I squeeze my eyes shut and roll toward the sidewalk.

  Luckily, the truck isn’t going very fast. The driver swerves and misses me by half a meter as the truck comes to a full stop. There’s a crash from the back of the truck, and then someone says, “Oh, bloody hell.”

  I can’t see what caused the crashing noise, but it must not be too major, because several people are laughing. “Nice work, Eric!” one of them calls out. “Nearly went arse over tip off the lorry.”

  A woman reaches down a hand to pull me up. “Are you hurt?”

  “Thanks. And no, I’m just scraped a bit.” My ankle also twinges, but it holds my weight as I step back onto the sidewalk.

  One of the guys on the back of the truck—Eric, I presume—is getting to his feet. John Lennon frowns, rubbing the back of his head, and another member of the band leans down to pick up the snare drum that toppled over.

  “Could have been far worse,” the woman tells me. “You were lucky.”

  The crowd begins to drift to the back of the churchyard. I wander around for a few minutes, reading the gravestones. Only one of the stones is still standing in 2136. I don’t know if they relocated the bodies or just did away with the other headstones, but they left the one bearing the name of Eleanor Rigby. There’s also a plaque on the building in my time, explaining that the headstone was the inspiration for one of Lennon and McCartney’s songs.

  My ankle is still throbbing, so I take a seat on the low garden wall to listen when the Quarry Men begin to play. The first song has a bunch of doo-wahs and doobies, and while they’re not bad for a bunch of sixteen-year-olds, I’m not all that impressed. Maybe it would be more enjoyable if I wasn’t alone, or if I had more knowledge about this subject and era, or even if I had heard more than one or two of the songs by the band—not this band, but the famous one that Lennon will eventually form. The historian who owned this key was probably as thoroughly into music history as Katherine Shaw was into that World’s Fair she visited or the various social movements she wrote about in the diary. He or she probably found this jump fascinating. But my ankle and arm are both sore, and most of the fun has gone out of this excursion.

  The one odd thing that catches my eye is a flash of orange light in the small group of people clustered near the wall on the opposite side of the churchyard. It’s almost certainly a reflection from the sun. My view of the group is mostly obstructed by the crowd, but it’s four adults and a child. Not a small child, but a boy of maybe eleven or twelve, with dark hair and eyes. He’s paying attention to something else—probably the band—when I first look their direction, but he must feel my eyes on him because he meets my stare and holds it, clearly annoyed.

  I look away, and when the song is over, I limp back to the stable point, since it’s one spot I already know has decent cover for me to blink out. I’m maybe a meter away from the hedge when something hits me. Not something I can see, but it has an intense physical impact. I feel a gut-wrenching blow and barely manage to stagger behind the holly bush. Leaning against the bricks, I slide down to the ground and focus on my breathing, trying to fight off waves of nausea and dizziness. I sit there clutching my knees to my chest, relieved that I made it somewhere out of view of the crowd.

  The feeling gradually subsides, and I realize it was probably a delayed shock reaction from nearly getting hit by the truck. I’ve had anxiety attacks in the past. They were fairly frequent after Dad died and our economic situation bottomed out. But this was by far the most vicious, and it seemed to hit me out of nowhere. I’ve never had a panic attack that literally drove me to the ground.

  What scares me most, however, isn’t the physical reaction, but the thoughts running through my head. I can’t quite shake the feeling that none of this is real. My mother wasn’t at her flat. She’s moved away. So has Nora. Both the flat in London and Nora’s cottage in Bray were vacant. I called but couldn’t find them.

  It’s like the dreams I had right after my dad died. The dreams were so vivid, like I was awake and going about some mundane task, but I also knew I was asleep. If I could only scream, I thought, someone would hear me. They’d help me. I’d wake up. But each time I opened my mouth, no sound came out. I’d thrash about, trying to wake up. Jarvis pegged them as false awakenings, when I put him in psychotherapy mode. He said they were possibly caused by anxiety and also that they were fairly typical abandonment dreams, not unusual after the death of someone close.

  I’ve never had one of those dreams while awake, though. Maybe the feeling was triggered by the panic attack?

  When I finally calm down enough to steady my hands, I take out the CHRONOS key so I can go home. But my mind is very much torn between two different meanings of that word. There’s my physical home, the house in Bethesda, in 2136, where Jack and Alex are waiting for me to return. But another voice in my head says that home isn’t a place, but a time. A time when my father was alive, the family was solvent, and I had no clue that I was a genetically enhanced time traveler.

  The voice also reminds me that I have the tool in my hands that could—just maybe—make home exist again.

  I pull up the stable point I created in Nora’s sitting room and scroll back almost two years to Christmas Eve 2134. The last normal Christmas, the last time I was really and truly home. Through the key, I see the sofa where Nora sat last night as we read her grandmother’s diary, except there’s a red-and-green knitted blanket draped over the back. Holidays at Nora’s are an odd pastiche of customs from her childhood in the US and local traditions from my grandfather’s family. For as long as I can remember, she always had the place decorated when we arrived, except for the stockings and the last small box of ornaments, the special ones that she saved for me and my dad to add to the tree. Mom has never really understood the hoopla over Christmas—it just isn’t something her family did—and she clearly thinks Nora goes way overboard with the cookies and the lights and the quaint gumdrop tree on the kitchen counter. So hanging those last ornaments was our special tradition, just me and Dad.

  I’d planned to keep scanning through until I found a time when Matthew Grace was alone in the front room. All I’d need is a few seconds. Just long enough to tell him to make an appointment with a cardiologist. But I get pulled into the memory when I see him walk into the room with the box. I’m a few steps behind him, laughing about something I wish I could remember now as I put the tray of eggnog and cookies on the tea table. Once again, I wonder why there’s no sound on this device. It can transport me through time and across the damn ocean, and it can’t let me hear his voice again?

  But I don’t really need the sound. I remember this conversation vividly. I’d recently broken up with David, the guy I’d been dating for several years, and my father was a little surprised that I was in such good spirits. I admitted that the split had been kind of a relief. David had been with me at Nora’s the previous year, and it hadn’t felt right. He didn’t fit. And even though David never said anything out loud, I had the sense he was smirking at the Grace family traditions. I really liked David most of the time, maybe even loved him a bit, but I’d known then that he would never be part of home. And I think maybe David knew it, too. It had just taken us almost a year to break the habit of being a couple, mostly because we both hated doing things alone.

  I was facing the tree as I talked to my dad, searching for the perfect spot to hang a tiny silver bell, so I never saw th
e shadow cross my father’s face as I talked about the breakup. But I see it now through the key. Dad was never all that crazy about David—something I knew, even though he’d never have admitted it—so it’s not that he was sad about us ending things. It’s something else that’s bothering him, and it bugs me that I don’t know what. That I can’t make the me who is scanning the tree for a bare spot turn around and ask him what’s wrong.

  By the time the earlier version of me looks back at him, the shadow is gone. All I see is his warm smile.

  I watch now, the words in my memory syncing with the image of him saying, “You’re a smart girl, Max. Hold out for someone who makes you happy. There are worse things than being a little bit lonely.”

  My dad would have liked Jack. And even though it’s too soon to know for certain, I think Jack would have fit at Nora’s. I think he could eventually be part of that feeling called home.

  And it’s that thought that gives me the strength to look away from my dad standing there next to the tree with the box of our Christmas treasures. I squeeze my eyes shut and feel a few stray tears coursing down my cheeks. Then I pull up the stable point in the library back in Bethesda. I pan around until I see Jack, sitting next to the computer where Alex is working.

  That’s odd. He was in another chair when I blinked out, closer to the stable point. It’s been about thirty-six hours for me, but only a few seconds have passed for him. He should still be in the chair looking at the stable point. Giving me that slightly nervous smile.

  I scroll back and see the exact moment when he leaves the chair. It’s almost instantaneous after I jump out. He and Alex both startle and then hurry toward the desk in the far corner of the room.

  Each time I’ve used the key, when I’ve looked back at the stable point, the scene has always been the same as when I left. The only exception is when I doubled back to the beach at Estero to retrieve my shoes.

  And that almost certainly means something has changed.

  THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID (MARCH 7, 1990)

  Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” Commemorated in Selma

  (Montgomery, Ala.) Twenty-five years ago today, a group of nearly six hundred civil rights activists gathered for a protest march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after a former US senator and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan in the late 1800s. The 1965 march was organized by Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose members had come to Dallas County to aid local groups in voter registration. Efforts to organize were blocked by local courts and law enforcement. Prior to the march, police raided a group at a rally in a neighboring town, shooting a black teen, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was attempting to protect his mother from the onslaught. Several journalists covering the march were also severely beaten.

  Leaders of the SCLC were determined to undertake a peaceful march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the escalating violence against African Americans and their continued disenfranchisement. Alabama Governor George C. Wallace banned the march, but organizers were not deterred. At the end of the bridge, they were met by the local sheriff and state troopers, some on horseback, armed with tear gas and billy clubs.

  Marchers had to retreat. Several claimed that the armed police had attempted to force them over the side of the bridge into the Alabama River.

  Images of the violence prompted people from around the nation to travel to Selma in protest. Many of them were ministers, heeding a call by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the SCLC. On March 9th, King attempted to lead 1,500 marchers across the bridge, but they were forced to turn back. The only concession made was that the state troopers allowed them to kneel and pray before retreating.

  James Reeb, one of three Unitarian ministers who joined the second march, was beaten by a mob of angry white men after eating at an integrated diner in the town. Reeb’s death two days later prompted action by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who said at a press conference on March 13th, “What happened in Selma was an American tragedy. The blows that were received, the blood that was shed, the life of the good man that was lost, must strengthen the determination of each of us to bring full and equal and exact justice to all of our people.”

  Johnson also expressed the belief that Gov. Wallace would work with him in protecting the right of the marchers to peacefully protest. When Wallace reneged on their agreement, Johnson nationalized the Alabama National Guard, and sent several thousand federal troops and law enforcement officers to Selma as peacekeepers.

  On March 15th, Johnson stood before Congress to speak on the proposed Voting Rights Act, saying, “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

  Several days later, the final march from Selma began, with the protection of state and federal troops. The numbers waxed and waned, but around ten thousand arrived in Montgomery on March 24th, camping at Catholic mission City of St. Jude. Dozens of celebrities, including Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Joan Baez, and the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, held a concert that evening on the church grounds. The next morning, approximately twenty-five thousand joined the last leg of the march to the Alabama State Capitol.

  One of the people in attendance was an SCLC volunteer, Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan while driving marchers back to Selma.

  The Voting Rights Act passed the US Senate in May by a vote of 77–19. It would go on to be passed in the House in July, and was eventually signed into law on August 6, 1965, with Dr. King and other SCLC leaders in attendance.

  ∞17∞

  TYSON

  CHRONOS HQ

  WASHINGTON, EC

  NOVEMBER 9, 2304

  Angelo walks in a few minutes before nine a.m. He’s carrying the small leather satchel I remember seeing him with back when he was an instructor. His normally ruddy skin is pale, and he looks much more frazzled than he did when he met me in the jump room yesterday. Or, yesterday for me, at least. All of that will happen a little over an hour from now for him, which means he’s already battling double memories. That will be the case for the next few hours, at a minimum. A small part of Angelo’s brain is no doubt telling him that he started out the day in his office, sipping a cup of that truly awful-smelling herbal tea he likes and chomping on his morning bagel while reading through jump reports and proposals. The other part is reeling from arriving at the office to find a message from himself, telling him that a level-five event is about to upend the entire organization, not to mention the timeline, if we don’t find a way to prevent it.

  Even though Angelo is only in his late fifties, he’s moving like an old man right now, and it’s unnerving to see him like this. For most of us who finished training in the past few years, Angelo is like a second father. We start classroom training at age ten, and we don’t see our families much after the first year. By the fourth year, we have less in common with them than we do with the instructors here at CHRONOS. It’s not just a matter of similar interests, but also similar language and customs. So much of our training is practical, making sure that we can actually fit into the eras and places we visit without disrupting anything. Before Angelo took over as jump coordinator, he was an instructor and residence-hall adviser. He was the man with the answers, the one who could usually fix whatever problem you brought to him or, more often, give you solid advice on how to fix it yourself. But given that Angelo is well past the age where he can use the CHRONOS key, he has to rely on us to fix this problem. And it’s one vicious bear of a problem.

  He puts the satchel on the edge of one of the bunks and sits down next to it. “So give me some good news.” The look on his face tells me that he already suspects we don’t have good news.

  Over the past twenty-three hours, Rich, Katherine, and I have been sleeping in shifts, while the other two tweak the parameters of the simulation and personally comb through every news article, video, or photograph that we ca
n find concerning the three events from both the old timeline and the new. The goal is to pinpoint a single change that could feasibly have caused a time shift that killed over thirty-two thousand people and erased or altered millions more. Truthfully, I’d argue that the death-toll statistic should be much higher, because one of the more significant changes to the timeline is the fact that the Genetics War starts a year earlier, but anything more than twenty years out from the dates of those first four significant early deaths in the 1960s isn’t calculated into the total.

  After forty-two separate simulation runs, we still don’t have anything definitive. Only one thing stood out, and it’s a long shot. We’re looking for answers, and it’s possible that my mind is making a connection that doesn’t actually exist. But there are now two additional people in the photograph of the Klansmen protesting outside the Coliseum. The extra men are standing off to one side, near a chain-link fence. One of them is facing the camera. He’s short and overweight, and when the simulator enhanced the resolution, I discovered that he looks a lot like Lenny Phelps, from the South Carolina Klan. I can’t see his companion’s face, but he’s taller. Thinner, too. It could very easily be Scoggin.

  “None of the simulations were able to isolate a change that would have caused all four early deaths,” Rich tells Angelo. “We can say with sixty-four percent certainty that it involves a racial hate group called the Ku Klux Klan. The thing that’s throwing the calculations off is the attack in March of 1965, since that’s before Tyson’s jump to the graduation speech by Dr. King.”

  “What about one of the other historians who went out at the same time?” Angelo asks. “Did you factor in their dates and locations?”