Timebound (8 page)

Katherine continued. “Had my family been less well off or less inclined to invest in my future, I might have been given special aptitude for healing or for music, or some other trade or craft. My father’s chosen gift was chemistry. My mother’s chosen gift was logic, and she worked for many years at CHRONOS—programming
the computers that were used to track historical missions and analyze the data they collected.”

I took a sip of my coffee, wishing for some milk to cut the burned taste. “What exactly is CHRONOS? I saw that in several diary entries.”

“Chrono-Historical Research Organization and Natural Observation Society,” Connor said through a mouthful of cookie. “Proving that future Americans are just as willing as their ancestors to contrive a title in order to get a good backronym.”

“At any rate,” Katherine said, raising an eyebrow at him, “my mother loved her work at CHRONOS—no surprise, since she and everyone else of my time are, quite literally,
born
to love their jobs. But I think there was some small element of wanderlust in her soul. The chosen gift she selected for me meant that I would see different times and places—”

“But,” I interrupted, my voice a bit hesitant, “what about free choice? I mean, what if you’d rather have been a chemist, like your dad? Or a baker? Or…”

Katherine smiled, but it was a tired smile. I could see that it wasn’t the first time she’d dealt with these questions. “Yes. But there is much to be said for making some adjustments before birth. How much time is wasted today training children to perform a variety of skills that they not only will never use but would never even
consider
using? I remember your mother complaining that she would never need to know the square root of anything, and while I forced her to do the math homework nevertheless, we both knew she was correct.

“Don’t get me wrong—people still learned about subjects beyond their occupation. We still had hobbies and avocations. But we all knew the general route to our primary destination when the journey began, and we didn’t regret the destination, nor did we have any desire to change it. After all, our genetic makeup ensured that we would be far better at our jobs than anything else
we attempted—and far better at our jobs than others, who did not have that chosen gift, could ever be.”

“So everything you are was determined before you were born, by this… enhancement?”

“No. The only thing that was changed before my birth was my
chosen
gift. I have some natural gifts from my parents—my mother could sing beautifully and I can carry a tune quite well. Like you, I have my father’s eyes, although you’re lucky—Harry’s eyes are far more striking.”

Connor leaned forward and squinted a bit, staring me straight in the eyes. “Very… green.” Unsure whether it was intended as a compliment, or whether Connor even bothered with such niceties, I simply nodded.

“I also have some residual effects from the chosen gifts my parents received. Like my mother, I’m good with computers.” Connor snorted derisively and Katherine amended the statement. “Or rather, I’m good with computers that are not centuries before my time. I am more than happy, however, to let Connor handle the archaic piles of nuts and bolts that
he
refers to as a computer.”

Katherine stopped to take a sip of her coffee and turned back to me. “I do understand your… concern… about free choice, but let’s set that aside for the time being, okay? I didn’t devise the society in which I was born any more than you devised this one, and I’m perfectly willing to admit that it has its flaws. The point I wanted to make is that the gifts of the parent—all gifts, chosen and natural—are passed along to the child. I inherited some from my mother, some from my father, and I
acquired
one specific, chosen gift that I passed on to your mother and that she clearly passed on to you, given your reaction to the medallion.”

I was getting increasingly confused. “But Mom can’t see the light on the medallion.”

“That doesn’t mean the trait isn’t there. It’s just recessive. It might not even be the reason she’s interested in contemporary
American history. She was exposed to it enough through Jim. He was one of those professors who always had historical anecdotes on the tip of his tongue. In your case, however, the trait is dominant.”

“Why do you think that?” I asked. “Just because I can see that blue light? I mean, I like history, but I like a lot of subjects. I haven’t decided what I want to do. I could just as easily settle on math, you know—or a foreign language. Or law.”

“It’s not just a matter of
interest,
Kate. For many of the specialized trades and professions, a chosen gift—the genetic ‘enhancement,’ as you call it—carries with it the ability to operate specialized equipment used in that profession. I saw you in the kitchen yesterday. You were born a CHRONOS historian, whether you want to be or not, just as I was.

“I won’t bore you with all the mundane details of my job,” she continued, “but unlike your mother, who must study her field through documents and artifacts, I traveled to the sites where history was made. I specialized in women’s political movements, mostly American, mostly nineteenth century, although I took a few side trips into the twentieth century to follow long-term trends. I learned history by watching Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, and Lucy Stone argue, both publicly and privately, while I was disguised as someone from their era.

“In order to ensure”—she glanced at Connor and made a wry face—“or at least
try
to ensure the sanctity of the timeline, CHRONOS allowed only a limited number of historians. There were thirty-five active historians when I joined in 2298. I took the place of the thirty-sixth, who was retiring. This key is the portable unit that allowed us to return to headquarters when our research was complete. And the diaries were our link in the field—a quick way to get an answer to any question that hadn’t been answered in preliminary research.

“The important point for now,” she said, “is that the altered gene structure allowed me—and through inheritance, allows
you
—to activate the CHRONOS key. Or the medallion, as you call it. When I was in training, I would hold the key and eventually ‘see’ the surroundings of the set coordinates to which I would be transported. There are a certain number of destination points on each continent, established in areas that we know have been stable points throughout the period we’re examining. For example, one stable point in this area is a corridor in the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol that escaped destruction in the War of 1812—it is a geographic stable point between 1800 and 2092.”

“What happens in 2092?” I asked.

Katherine’s mouth tightened into a firm line. “The corridor ceased to be a stable point.”

“Don’t even bother to push on that,” Connor interrupted. “She’ll go all ‘need-to-know’ on you.”

“To get back to the medallion,” Katherine said, “it allows the user to scope out the territory, make minor temporal adjustments if needed, and determine the best time to make the jump.”

“So how did you wind up here—now? Did you just decide to stay in the past? Or was there an accident of some sort?”

“It certainly wasn’t an accident,” Katherine answered. “It was made to look that way, however. Your grandfather—Saul, your biological grandfather—sabotaged CHRONOS and stranded the teams at their various locations. I was scheduled for a jump to Boston 1853, but… let’s just say I was forced to make a last-minute adjustment. Saul had…”

Katherine paused, phrasing her words carefully. “Saul had fallen in with some bad elements in our society, and I’m quite sure he planned to follow me. He was always a black-and-white sort of person. Either you were friend or you were foe, with no gray area in between. He considered me a traitor, and he would have killed me and—although he wouldn’t have realized it—your mother and Prudence along with me, if I had not ducked into 1969 at the very last minute.”

Over the next hour, I learned how Katherine had started a new life in the 1970s. She emerged in an abandoned barn about a mile outside Woodstock, New York, in mid-August of 1969, taking the place of a music historian friend who had hoped to see Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix at the festival. Dressed in the height of fashion for the 1853 destination for which she’d been scheduled, Katherine was somewhat overdressed for a rock concert. Hoping to get at least some usable data for the friend whose slot she had taken, she removed the pins from her hair, stashed the elaborate gown, gloves, and button-up shoes in her carpetbag, and headed for the concert in just her silk chemise, pantalettes, and a black lace choker. She was still a bit more fully covered than many of the young women at the concert, but after a few hours in the mud and heat, she said, she managed to blend into the crowd.

“I returned to the stable point—the barn—several times over the next few weeks and tried to contact headquarters. But I could see nothing—just a black void with occasional bursts of static. I tried to correspond using one of the diaries that I had packed, but it vanished. It was as though everything from my time no longer existed.”

“So why didn’t you go back to the day before you left?”

Connor nodded. “I asked that, too.”

“You’ve both seen too many movies, I’m afraid. I couldn’t just zip from one location to any other point in time. The CHRONOS key allowed me to emerge at one preprogrammed stable point and then return to CHRONOS headquarters when my work was done. No side trips allowed.

“Fortunately,” she continued, “CHRONOS historians followed the Boy Scout motto: ‘Be Prepared.’ If we could not contact headquarters, we were to find a way to blend in and lie low for a year or
two. And, after that point, if we still had no contact with home, we were to give up and try to create normal lives in our new time and place.”

Using a safe-deposit key stitched into her undergarments, Katherine had retrieved the contents of a box initially set up in 1823 with the Bank of New York. She selected the best option from the array of identities inside, invented a husband who had died in the war in Vietnam, and over the next few months secured a university research position.

She had tried to find information about a few of the other historians whose destinations had been the relatively recent past, including Richard, the friend who swapped places with her and landed in 1853. “I would love to know how he managed to blend in after arriving in the bell-bottom jeans and rather loud shirt he was wearing at the time. He would have been perfectly dressed for Woodstock—but I’m sure that he looked rather ridiculous for 1853. Richard was always clever, however. I eventually learned that he edited a newspaper in Ohio for the next forty years, married, had children and grandchildren. That wasn’t protocol—we were told to avoid having children at all costs—but I would imagine that was a bit hard if you were stranded in the 1850s and wanted a normal life.”

She sighed. “He died in 1913. It was strange to read that he had grown old and died so long ago when I’d seen him just a few weeks before. He was a good friend, although I think he’d have liked to be more than that. If I hadn’t been so fixated on Saul…

“Anyway,” she continued, shaking her head as if to clear it, “I sent a letter to the granddaughter who was Richard’s caregiver before he died. I told her I was writing a history on nineteenth-century journalists and her grandfather was one of the people I was researching, and I was surprised when she asked me to visit in person. When I arrived, she went straight to her china cabinet and pulled out a CHRONOS key.

“She said that her grandfather had always been a bit psychic and he told her that one day when she was in her seventies, a woman named Katherine might come asking questions. If that happened, Richard said that she should give me that old medallion and his diary, because I’d know what to do with them.

“I packed Richard’s key away with my other belongings when I married Jimmy, a few months later. He was a young history professor, and I was a newly widowed research assistant, six months pregnant with your mother and Prudence.”

She smiled softly. “Jim should have been born in an era where knights-errant rescued damsels in distress—when he met me, he became a man with a mission. I was reluctant to marry so quickly. CHRONOS members were told to wait at least a year before making the decision on how to best assimilate. But I knew better than the others that this was, in all likelihood, something worse than a mere technical glitch. Jim and I were married before the girls were born and they were, in every sense other than biological, truly his girls. I could not have asked for a more devoted husband and father.”

“So Mom doesn’t know?” I asked. “I mean, even after the accident, you didn’t tell her that Jim wasn’t her father?”

Katherine looked a bit surprised at the suggestion. “Do you really think that I
should
have told her? She was angry enough at me as it was—telling her a different lie about a father killed in Vietnam was pointless. And telling the truth would just have convinced her that I was insane. I did the only thing I could do after Jim died—I tried to get her sister back from Saul. And I failed.”