Erasing Time (6 page)

Echo sighed, looked down the hallway, then stepped into the elevator. As he watched the floor numbers change, he told himself he didn’t have time to worry about these girls. He had other problems. He had plans to make.

It didn’t work. He worried about them anyway, kept thinking about what it would be like to wake up and find yourself uploaded into another century.

A few minutes later, they reached Lab Fifteen. Several scientists were there, going over data at various computer terminals. Jeth headed toward one of the lead scientists, and Echo followed.

The man’s name was Anton. Echo remembered him from this morning because of the red slash zigzagging across his face. Those had been popular last year. Half the city had gone around looking like they’d been gouged in some horrible battle. But lately the color red had fallen out of style. Scientists, like wordsmiths, it seemed, didn’t keep up with fashion trends. Echo might have been wearing red himself if his brother hadn’t been so attentive to fashion cycles.

And now that his brother was gone …

Echo felt a sharp pain at the reminder and shook off the thought. It was better not to think of his brother. Every time Echo’s mind wandered in that direction, he felt his concentration, his strength—everything—caving in.

Think about now, he told himself.

Anton scrolled down through equations on the screen without noting the wordsmith’s arrival.
“Bien … bien … bien,”
he muttered. “
Sangre
, if we’d made a mistake, the stabilizer gains would be off phase.”

Jeth made a small coughing noise, and Anton looked up. When he saw it was the wordsmiths, he returned his attention to the screen. “Is there a problem with the time riders?”

“No,” Jeth said. “They’ve recovered from their shock and are already adapting.”

“Bien.”

“We’ll need to put them somewhere. Have they been assigned rooms?”

Anton momentarily stopped scrolling. “We’d planned on keeping Tyler Sherwood here at the Scicenter, but nothing flies right the first time you toss it in the air.” He straightened, caressing the small of his back with one hand. “We should have planned for a failure. We should have strained someone less important the first time.”

Echo glanced at the computer, his eyes taking in the rows of numbers in a casual manner. “You can’t find Tyler Sherwood at all?”

Anton frowned and bent toward the screen. “It’s not a simple procedure. Helix says we should go back farther in time, where Sherwood’s signal is more accessible, but if we took him before he was through making his contribution to science—think of the history implosions that could occur. We only have a
poquito
of time, the smallest of slots to work with. A miscalculation too early could bring us a child.” Anton swiped a finger across the monitor, and the screen changed. “We need to pick up Tyler Sherwood’s signal toward the end of his life.”

“I’m sure you’ll accomplish it,” Jeth said. “Until then, we’ll take the girls to the Histocenter and work with them.”

Anton looked around the room, this time lowering his voice and leaning closer to the wordsmiths. “Helix wants us to do a memory wash on them today and erase our mistake altogether, but the rest of us think it’s too early for that.”

“A memory wash?” Jeth’s shoulders sagged as though the air had gone out of him. “That can’t be necessary?”

“It’s not wise,” Anton agreed. “You don’t destroy the first experiment just because it didn’t work. You study it to find out what went wrong. That’s the problem with having government officials in charge of the program. They don’t appreciate how science works.”

Jeth held up one hand in a gesture of protest. “We have the opportunity to learn about history from the girls. Helix must understand that.”

Anton grunted. “Unfortunately, government officials don’t appreciate history either.”

“Why do a memory wash?” Echo’s words came out harsher than he’d intended. “The girls haven’t been convicted of any crimes or fanaticisms.”

Anton’s gaze circled the room again, and he lowered his voice even further. “To keep it a secret. If the public found out about the Time Strainer, it would be one outrage after another. Half of Traventon would be furious we tampered with history, and the other half would be furious we’re not using it to bring their favorite rock band back to life.”

That, Echo thought, was a generous assessment of the public’s reaction. More likely, 80 percent of the people would think only of rock bands. The other 20 percent were Dakine, who would devote themselves to stealing the Time Strainer so they could use it to alter history to their advantage. Hadn’t the government officials considered that?

Probably not. Just like they hadn’t considered that there were some things a memory wash couldn’t fix. Even if the girls’ memories were erased, their culture would still be hard-wired into them. They would still speak old-twenties English. They would still have a residual knowledge of how things worked back then and no knowledge of how things worked now. If the scientists didn’t consider this beforehand, they’d realize it soon after. And then what would they do with the girls? Terminate them?

“Delay the memory wash,” Jeth told Anton. “You might still collect useful information from them. They came from the same period as Tyler Sherwood.”

“Yes.” Anton said the word slowly, as though he was running intense mathematical equations as he spoke. “That is a peculiar coincidence, isn’t it?”

“Think what a freeze it would be,” Jeth added, “if you erased their memories and then needed information from them.”

Anton nodded in measured agreement. “We’ll try to convince Helix not to do the wash until we have Tyler Sherwood here.”

Jeth smiled. “I’m sure that won’t be long, so we’ll study the girls while we can.” As he turned to walk away, he added, “Beep me when you have Tyler Sherwood, and we’ll come back to translate.”

Anton nodded again, still with the deep-mathematical-equations look on his face. He didn’t say good-bye as they left.

Back in the hallway, Jeth set a quick pace to the Infolab. “A memory wash,” he said with scorn. “Government officials and scientists have no understanding of the importance of history. None at all.”

“It’s a good thing that the government works so slowly,” Echo said.

“Not slowly enough,” Jeth said.

As soon as Jeth and Echo left the room, Sheridan sank into one of the chairs. She felt overloaded, numb. “Is this really the future?”

Taylor was pacing back and forth in front of the row of computers. “What else could it be?”

“Maybe it’s a bad dream—some sort of psychotic nervous breakdown from too much studying.”

“Great,” Taylor said. “That means I’m the one with the breakdown. You never study.”

Sheridan lifted her chin. “I do too. I study all the time.”

“You read novels.”

“I’m in honors English. That
is
studying.”

Taylor sighed and waved her hand in dismissal. “I’m probably in some sort of coma right now, while you’re off reading
Wuthering Heights
and eating potato chips.” Another sigh. “I should have been an English major. A fat lot of good physics did me.”

Neither of them spoke again, but even their silences were full of meaning. Taylor was working things out in her mind, and Sheridan waited for her evaluation.

Taylor kept pacing.

Finally Sheridan prodded her. “Do you think animals are really extinct?”

Taylor turned on her heel and walked back in the other direction. “The chances of a complete extinction are somewhere between not likely and utterly impossible. People couldn’t have survived for hundreds of years—even in protected cities—if the rest of earth’s ecosystems had been destroyed. Plants, insects, and animals are interdependent, so the fact that there is still oxygen on the planet suggests that to some degree they are still alive.”

“Then why do the people here believe—”

“Because it’s what their government wants them to believe. They don’t want people leaving the city.” Taylor stopped pacing and sat down next to Sheridan. She looked like a doctor about to give a patient unpleasant news. “Major plagues swept around the world eight times over the last four centuries. Seventy-five percent of the people died off. Jeth says that’s why they do genetic breeding now—to ensure the population is disease resistant.”

“Echo told me how they have children,” Sheridan said. “It seems wrong.”

Taylor didn’t comment on its wrongness. “Individual city-states rule their own people now. Traventon is one of the largest, and it has the habit of racking up huge debts with other cities. When it defaults, it goes to war with its creditor. It has advanced technology, so it’s come out on top so far, but that can’t go on indefinitely.”

Without meaning to, Sheridan gripped the edge of her chair. It sounded like the beginning of a bad list, and she could tell Taylor was holding back information, testing her to see how she dealt with little chunks of misfortune before she handed her the whole thing. “What else?” Sheridan asked.

“Government-appointed chairmen control everything in Traventon, and there’s no way to get rid of them. Regular people don’t have a vote, don’t have weapons, and don’t even have access to information. You need a government clearance to own a computer with internet capabilities, and it’s illegal to access sites outside your professional needs.” She shook her head. “Jeth was so proud of the humane way they treat their criminals. They erase their memories and make them do menial work in the Agrocenter. Which might not be so awful, except that anyone who disagrees with the government is a criminal. No one is even allowed out of the city without permission. I think that’s the real reason why all the cities are domed.”

Sheridan didn’t stop gripping her chair. “We can’t stay here.”

“We can’t go back,” Taylor stated flatly.

“We don’t know that. We’re just taking their word for it.” Sheridan stood, turned around the room, and looked for—she didn’t know what. All that met her eyes were chairs, desks, and computers. Cold, inanimate objects. “Maybe you could figure out how to make the Time Strainer go backward.” As she said the words, she felt the first inklings of hope rise within her. “You’re as smart as any of those scientists. I know you are.”

Taylor’s expression remained rigid. “It isn’t that simple. It’s not like I can flip a reverse button on the machine.”

“Then make it work another way.”

Taylor grunted like she always did when she thought something was painfully obvious and she shouldn’t have to explain it. “First of all, they’ll never let me anywhere near that machine or any of its specifications. Second, even if I studied it, that doesn’t mean I could figure out how to work it differently.

“Third, if I came up with an idea for a time machine, I wouldn’t have the tools, material, or staff to make it. I mean, I understand the aerodynamic theories behind airplanes, but that doesn’t mean I can build one in my spare time.

“And even if the first three issues didn’t exist, I wouldn’t build a time machine anyway. It’s bad enough this society can drag people to the future. I wouldn’t want them to be able to insert themselves into the past too.” The edge left Taylor’s voice, and only resignation remained. “We’re stuck here and we’d better learn to deal with it.”

Silence followed Taylor’s statement. A silence so deep, it penetrated every part of Sheridan. Every hope that had sprung up now withered painfully. She sat back on her chair with a thud.

“On the positive side,” Taylor added, “they’ve got some cool technology here. Like cleaning robots. And a lot of their sites say they’re close to finding a cure for aging.” She shrugged, looking wary again. “Of course, that might just be an excuse to control people’s wages. Everyone has to pay an immortality tax to keep the government’s research going.”

Sheridan didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. Taylor could read Sheridan’s silences as well as Sheridan could read Taylor’s.

Taylor let out a sigh. “All right. Later, when we know we’re safe, I’ll try to study their technology to figure out if there’s any way to go home. Until then, we need to act happy and not resentful, or we’ll find ourselves working in the Agrocenter with no memory of how we got there.” She waved her hand encouragingly in Sheridan’s direction. “So show some enthusiasm. Smile once in a while. That’s all I’m asking.”

A few moments later Jeth and Echo returned. Sheridan couldn’t smile, but she wasn’t screaming, which showed much more enthusiasm than she actually felt.

Jeth and Echo took them to the Histocenter in a beige, egg-shaped car with darkened windows. Instead of seats in rows, one circular seat wrapped around the interior of the car. No one drove. Jeth put his hand on the control panel, spoke the destination, and the car started up and glided slowly along the silver rails that ran down the middle of the streets. The whole thing vaguely reminded Sheridan of an amusement park ride.

A radio automatically came on, and a woman’s lilting voice spoke words Sheridan couldn’t quite understand.

Echo took a metal tube from his pocket and handed it to his father. Jeth waved it over the control panel, and the voice stopped. “We don’t need to listen to city updates right now,” he said. “I’d rather talk.”

He handed the tube back to his son, then smiled at Taylor and Sheridan. “Don’t tell anyone we have a silencer. They’re slightly illegal.”