The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (44 page)

I brought that up to Horejsi and she touched my hand – she was still sitting very close – and said, “Whose favorite phrase is ‘theorizing in advance of data’?”

It took me a moment to get it. “Mine,” I admitted.

“Well?”

“Yeah.” She made that weird grimace she does instead of a grin; another thing Horejsi likes is being right.

We talked through a review of what we knew. “How bad was the weather this spring?” Horejsi asked. “I never remember weather.”

“Three spring blizzards after his date of arrival, and that bad cold snap we had in late March – it was minus seven Celsius on March 28 and minus three on March 29.”

She nodded, letting apertures open all over the spheres of her eyes, taking in all of the nice, crisp December day through the big window, as the train lifted off and glided through the downtown. “Then definitely, he found friends and shelter of some kind, right away, and something fed him,” she said. “No true isolation possible.”

The trick with breaking the causality between the traveler and his ballast was to grab and de-link the ballast as early as possible; create a situation in which the easiest Inconsistency Principle resolution would be that the ballast had always existed in our world and the time traveler had not. Then intemporia would take over and work on our side, erasing most of the changes. But for best effect, we had to de-link them early.

This one wouldn’t be early.

Of course you could also deal with human ballast the way we dealt with ballasts of mud or logs or deer; scramble it, chemically treat it, and scatter it. Most ballast hunters just didn’t like luring or kidnapping people to have them ground to bits and vaporized. Horejsi and I had occasionally muttered a suspicion to each other – that the Whenness Prophylaxis Program was just a preliminary step to make us investigators more comfortable, and that as soon as we were off the case, the ballast ended up as extremely overcooked sausage. I shuddered.

“Cold?” Horejsi asked.

“No, just thinking of something grim.”

“That family you saw means this is something huge,” she said, “and the bonus the FBI set makes a lot more sense now.”

We both knew that, but maybe it was comforting for her to keep saying things we both knew.

We got off at the Welton Station, and paused to let a Liejt levrail shoot by us, the D line, hurrying down Welton to Smallville. I wondered if the world would still be there when they got there, or if they’d still be the same people. It gave me the creeps.

Horejsi’s hand was on my arm again. I covered it with my other hand, to keep it there, because it felt kind of good.

It was still bright and sunny but the wind was picking up in a way that could feel like a nail driven up my nose, and the dry cold air seemed to tear at my skin. The Christmas wreaths and banners on the lampposts whipped and slapped alarmingly; I felt sorry for the poor Irish slaves who had had to put them up.

Changing the subject, she asked, “How many disturbances do you know about so far?” She kept her hand on my arm. I was grateful.

“A lot of statistics aren’t what they used to be,” I said. “Baseball looks like it’s more fun – scores are higher, all the statistics about stealing home from fourth base vanished, and teams are nine players instead of eleven – center and right shortstop are combined, and there’s no wing fielder.”

“And this is interesting because – ”

“Enormous number of public stadiums built to a different design, enormous number of records altered, lots of very public lives altered, and not in a way that maps one to one. Economics is pretty much the same – three of the main estimating components of the Gross Dominion Product are gone, replaced by something called ‘foreign trade,’ but that looks more like a change of bookkeeping. But the census tabulation changed drastically for the last hundred years, and the date when they started mining coal up in the high country is one hundred four years later.”

Horejsi whistled. “Those are some big mass-time changes. Which fits with that . . . anomaly . . . you saw.”

“Brown-skinned people wouldn’t use as much coal?” I asked, puzzled by what she meant.

“No, silly, I mean the change of skills.” She nodded at the Irishmen walking on the street-side sidewalk ahead of us; each was carrying home his coal ration and his little Thermos of LOX for his Franklin stove. “I’m sure any Irishmen that the brown-skinned people owned would use as much coal as anyone else. It’s just – their existence – the scale of that change . . . well, it’s consistent with changes as big as the ones you describe. That’s what I mean.” She sighed and rubbed her hand gently up and down my arm, brushing my coat sleeve and pressing a knuckle hard enough for me to feel it in my muscles. “Rastigevat, there were some big physical things in the last few hours. I-70 jumped down to Albuquerque, then up to Cheyenne and for a while ran along the path of US-50, yesterday, so we had a large number of lost and angry truckers and some cargoes just gone. About seventy of those weird little passenger-only trucks that show up sometimes during anomalies drove into Pueblo over the temporary I-70; most of the people who arrived in them are acquiring new memories right now, though a few have just vanished. Three whole train cars of Irish that were going to be put to work in Aspen for the holidays are just gone, along with all their titles and registration. And what that I in I-70 stands for changes from Intergovernmental to Interim to Imperial and back to Interstate all the time.”

“Where was Denver when I-70 jumped?” I asked.

“Do you remember what we were doing yesterday?”

I thought for a moment. “Is today Tuesday?”

“Thursday.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. It’s a big mess, Rastigevat. Huge cultural changes too – the name of this continent keeps fluctuating between Armorica, Amorica, and Amocira, and every so often turning back into New Armorica, which is what they called it right after the airships found it and the Great Erasure started. Twice it has wavered into New Arimathea, which I guess means a more religious trend somewhere in the past, and once it was North Arimacha, which I don’t get at all. Three changes in Chaucer, thousands of different names in the London Registries, renamed ships with drastically different names in standard histories of England and the Untitled States, the Enlightenment 150 years later and all of history since then compressed to fit.

“Also, and don’t laugh at me for noticing – ”

“I never do,” I said. Actually I never laugh.

“I know and I appreciate that.” She squeezed my arm. “Anyway, there were several new authors added to the cata logs in the mid-nineteenth century. That one is okay with me; it looks like Peron undid Perkins’s permanent damage, so we have Samuel Clemens back. Even so, it looks like this time he was writing under a pseudonym, Mark Thrine, and I’m guessing from the title in the public library cata log that The True and Romantic Career of Becky Thatcher has been replaced by a novel about her boyfriend, Tom Sawyer, and there’s some kind of sequel about a minor character from that book, Irish Jim. I kind of hope we get to keep Clemens’s books – I remember liking them as a child.”

I had never gotten why people liked to read made-up stuff; it seemed to me it was bound to clutter your memory, keeping track of what was true and what wasn’t. But I could appreciate that Horejsi liked it. I rested my hand on hers, on my arm. “This stuff would all be so fun and exciting if it weren’t for the whole world disappearing.”

“You’re always my man for perspective, Rastigevat.” She made that smile-grimace again.

Even if they’re sort of acting like a normal couple, two people who radiate “cop,” one of them with Riemann eyes, don’t easily walk into a Geiger bank. Not that Brock’s people would be dumb enough to try to keep us out, but there was probably a pretty funny scene out back in the alley as people poured out the door and fell all over each other. Anyway, it was calm enough inside as we walked up to the young girl at the counter.

I ignored the clicking Geiger counters and their rolling digit displays. “We need to speak to Dutch Lop. Official business.”

“I – ” the girl flushed deeply, her pale skin going as red as her hair. No collar tattoo, so she was freeborn, but as everyone says, it takes generations to get the slave out of the Irish, and the sight of authority just paralyzes some of them especially in this part of town. “Um. I do’na’f he be – ”

“It’s all right, Brighd.” The accent did sound Dutch, but he pronounced that funny Irish gulp at the end of her name perfectly. The man who limped out to greet us was missing one ear and had an odd hairless scar on the top of his head. It looked like the cylinder of enclosure had been a bit tight, or he’d been moving, because the hand that reached out to shake mine was missing half a thumb.

He was in his early twenties, and his wide-set eyes and square jaw couldn’t have been more relaxed, confident, and utterly in charge if he’d been Liejt and expecting us to deliver a pizza. I don’t respond to faces much, but I liked the asymmetric shock of black hair around the scar, the big toothy grin, and the twinkling almost-black eyes under the thick brow. “I had thought you might be here sooner,” he said, speaking a trifle slowly, “but it is good you are here now.”

Horejsi suddenly froze like a squirrel on a levrail track, and opened so many apertures so wide that the spheres of her Riemann eyes were blotched with black dots the size of quarters. After a moment, she let her breath out and said, “It’s an honor to meet you.”

I looked back and forth, and then she explained. “Mr Rastigevat, this is Francis Tyrwhitt.”

“Frank,” he said. “They call me Frank here, at least to my face. I prefer it to Dutch Lop, if I may be Frank with you.”

I couldn’t help grinning; puns are one of the few kinds of joke I get, and Horejsi snorted and made her smile-grimace. “Is there somewhere we can talk privately?” she asked.

“There is,” he said. “Will you let Leo pat you down for weapons, please?”

“Of course,” I said. “There’s something in my left sock, one in the coat pocket, and something back between my shoulder blades.”

I had expected that Leo would be some immense, hulking goon, but he turned out to be a short, bony, big-jawed, freckled Irish boy, maybe fourteen years old, with the fresh scars from manumission around his neck, all big feet and hands and loose gangle.

Nonetheless he was a pretty good frisker, getting everything I had mentioned right away, and finding two of my three spares as well. He flushed red-bordering-on-purple as he searched Horejsi, but did an equally good job on her. When he had finished and nodded, Tyrwhitt touched him lightly on the shoulder, and Leo grinned like he’d won the lottery.

Tyrwhitt’s office was surprisingly luxurious – the surprise was not that it had obviously been expensive (you expect that with anything connected with organized crime), but the type of luxury it radiated. The room looked much more like the comfortable working den of a Liejt software developer or investment broker than the sort of medium-level organized crime boss office I’d been expecting. There was no gaudy, kitschy art; no visible gold or drug paraphernalia; only a standard wall projector, not one of the pricey monstrosities. He had gone for solid, practical, but not brand-name furniture. Nothing here would violate the Sumptuary Act, and if this place were ever busted in the media, there wouldn’t be much of the usual sneering and tsking about Liejt goods in a slum apartment.

He gestured to a cluster of warm leather-covered seats by a small gas fire, and said, “Well, let me pretend to be a conventional host for conventional guests. Would you like coffee, whiskey, anything?”

“How about coffee officially, and a splash of whiskey that just sort of happened?” Horejsi said. Her hand stroked my arm; I wasn’t sure what this was about, but I said, “Same for me.” There’s no rule about accepting food or drink from suspects; usually we like to stay sharp and avoid the possibility of being dosed, but sometimes not insulting hospitality is more important. I have no sense of that; maybe she was just cueing me in?

Tyrwhitt spoke an order into the air, and before we had quite settled onto the couch, Brighd came in with our drinks. When we had all pledged the Creator and taken a first appreciative sip of the good warm stuff, Tyrwhitt said, “All right, let me begin by saying I will be happy to consent to being disconnected from Alvarez Peron – in fact he intends that I should be – but the reason why I am utterly willing to cooperate is one your superiors will not like.”

“Well, when the ballast is cooperative, we’re mostly just the go-betweens anyway,” I said, “so why don’t you just explain it to us, Mr Tyrwhitt – ”

“Frank.”

“All right, Frank, just tell us what you want us to tell them, and we can proceed from there.”

He did, and bizarre as some of the stories we had heard had been, his was right off the scale. If I were trying to attach a number to how different it was, I’d say, roughly, that on a scale of weirdness-by-ballasts of one to ten, Frank Tyrwhitt was equal to the resultant vector of an isosceles triangle, e
^π+i
, and Wednesday.

“It’s the Creator’s sense of humor to weave the good and the bad together so tightly, I suppose. Time is one, and that is sad, but so is memory, and that is a blessing,” Tyrwhitt said. “There’s your problem, your opportunity, and what you need to do with me – if you’re smart.”

Horejsi, next to me on the couch – stroking my arm, which I found a little distracting – said, “You mean time is all one thing – ”

“I mean that experience and theory both show there’s only one world, and only one timeline, we don’t get to do everything, there’s no ‘out there,’ no cross-time or ‘otherwhen,’ in which things went differently,” Tyrwhitt said. “Which means we have to make the hard choice of what world to have, and there’s no compensating for that by telling ourselves that, well, things didn’t turn out so well in this version of time, but in the universe next door things are doubtless peachy – gloriously exciting or beautifully serene or whatever it is you personally favor – and the only real tragedy is that some of us have to live in the timelines that did not work out as well. Believing that would be a comforting escape, but it’s just not so. This is the world there is, and things are just done or undone and that’s all there is to it. There’s not a world out there where I didn’t come forward in time; this is all there is. And that’s sad, because it means that not only can we not have everything, even the whole universe can’t. Time is one, eh?”