Erasing Time (9 page)

Sheridan was understanding the accent so well now that her mind was automatically translating the Spanish words, mixing them with the English.

“Or,” the scientist went on, “we might have calculated the wrong energy signal for Tyler Sherwood. We were only able to get a partial DNA reading from his papers in the city museum. Or maybe the DNA we thought was his actually belonged to someone else....”

Helix frowned at the scientist, unimpressed by the explanation. “Have your analysis to me by tomorrow. Another failure won’t be tolerated.” He cast a disdainful look at Sheridan and Taylor, as though they had purposely thrown themselves into the Time Vortex just to vex him; then he turned and went to the door. Jeth accompanied him, asking about the next day’s schedule. The scientists trailed after them.

Echo sat back down next to Sheridan, watching the scientists leave. He whispered, “I almost feel sorry for the guy who tested you. He has no clue why his spectral reader gave him the same DNA result on both of you.”

Sheridan smiled despite herself and wondered how long it would take him to figure it out.

As Jeth returned to the couches, Taylor picked up a Rubik’s Cube from the end table beside her. “They haven’t zapped Mr. Sherwood into the future yet?”

“No,” Jeth said, sitting down beside her. “They can’t find his energy signature in the time stream anymore, and now the machine needs to reboot. They’ll make another attempt tomorrow.”

Taylor tried to twist one side of the Rubik’s Cube. It didn’t budge. “What exactly is an energy signature?”

Jeth gave a short laugh. “That’s the sort of thing I wasn’t able to learn in school. My sons, however, took some science classes before they decided to work with me.” He motioned to Echo to explain.

Sheridan didn’t remember half the stuff she learned in her science classes, but Echo didn’t have to pause to search his memory. “Every atom has a different wavelength, depending on its electrons and their orbits. So the combined atoms in each person’s DNA have a unique energy signal. The scientists are probably using energy signals in their search because those don’t decay over time. They’re constant.”

Taylor rotated the Rubik’s Cube and tried to twist a different section. It didn’t move either. “Why do they want Tyler Sherwood so badly?”

“He put forth theories in your generation that eventually changed the way scientists view matter.”

Jeth watched Taylor’s apparent attempt to wring the Rubik’s Cube but didn’t comment on it. “Our instructions are to tell Mr. Sherwood that he’ll work with our scientists to cure aging. He must have done work on regenerating cells.”

Taylor returned the untwisting Rubik’s Cube to the table. The replica clearly had flaws. “Matter. Energy signals. It sounds terribly complicated. That’s why I liked reading novels.”

“Ah yes,” Jeth said with rising enthusiasm. “You were going to tell me about the educational process.”

“What’s the point of telling you things,” Sheridan asked, remembering their talks about animals and religion with fresh frustration, “when you won’t believe what we say?” She didn’t mean to look at Echo while she said this. Somehow her gaze slid there anyway. She knew Jeth doubted her, and probably Elise did too, but it bothered her more that Echo didn’t believe her.

His blue eyes stared back at her, nearly as vibrant as the crescent moon he wore. He shouldn’t have looked like an intellectual. The blue hair that brushed against his broad shoulders should have canceled out any scholarly effect. And yet in the short time she’d known Echo, she could tell he was smart beyond his years. Like Taylor.

“You’ll tell us about your lives,” Jeth said. “Your experiences don’t include everything that took place in your time, though. We’ve spent so long studying history, we know things about your society and its influences that not even you realize.”

Sheridan gestured toward the Rubik’s Cube. “By studying pictures of things you obviously don’t understand? The sides on that are supposed to move, by the way.”

“By studying everything,” Echo said. “Especially words.”

Jeth leaned toward her intently. “Words are evidence of the past. They leave a trail. Every influence is recorded. For example, we can tell exactly when the Normans conquered England because of the influx of French words into the English language during the eleventh century. We know when a large Hispanic migration to America took place for the same reason. We can discern how people thought by the words they chose, the names they called things. Words always leave a trail.”

Jeth stopped suddenly and gave an apologetic smile. “I’m wasting time being a teacher when I should be asking questions. We have so little time together and so much to learn.”

As they talked, Sheridan turned Jeth’s sentence over in her mind. So little time together? If words left a trail, where did that sentence lead? What did the wordsmiths know that they weren’t telling her?

Echo had seen a hundred pictures of people from the old twenties. He’d studied catalog remnants and magazine remains. When the historical society had held its last Come-in-Costume darty, he’d put on replica 1950s jeans, T-shirt, and tennis shoes and danced the twist. He’d probably done it all wrong. No one had ever seen the complete dance, but that was part of the fun. Making up wild moves.

Anyway, he shouldn’t have been fascinated by Sheridan and Taylor’s clothes, but he couldn’t stop staring at them. Those were
real
jeans. They’d been made in some factory by oppressed workers, then funneled to rich merchants who dictated what the population had to wear. So much history resided in that cloth. More amazing still, Taylor and Sheridan were here, alive.

To memory wash them would be like destroying hieroglyphs from an ancient Egyptian tomb.

Frustration twined through Echo’s chest. While he stayed in the city, he could most likely prevent the girls from getting memory washes. And hadn’t he told Sheridan he would protect her? But how long could Echo stay in Traventon before the Dakine turned their attention to him?

Jeth ordered dinner, and the group ate while talking. Echo watched the girls’ expressions as he and Jeth asked them questions. He thought their reactions to the questions were nearly as interesting as their answers.

Taylor answered everything happily, asking questions of her own as she did. It was easy to tell she was smart, grasping new concepts and knowledge as soon as they were presented. Still, there was something about her that made Echo suspicious. Perhaps it was that she smiled so frequently, he couldn’t tell when she really meant it. If her smile was a pretense, what else was?

Sheridan was the opposite. Every emotion—surprise, frustration, disbelief—appeared in sequence on her face. Her sorrow tugged at him, even when he didn’t understand what caused it. During dinner she came close to tears three times—once when Jeth told her that few people chose to marry, once when Elise told her a government literature committee wrote all the novels, and the last time when Jeth mentioned that children were now raised by certified caretakers in government-run learning centers.

As though that were a bad thing.

He had never minded living there. Not really. And he’d seen his parents on weekends. Or at least he’d seen his father. His parents had detached from each other when he was seven, and after that his mother made such a habit of being with different men, he never knew when he would see her or what she would be like.

When he was fifteen, she became infatuated with a military officer and went with him on a defensive action against San Francisco. She never came back. The government said she’d been reassigned to permanent patrol, which meant she was dead. The government didn’t like to admit to casualties during any of its wars. They were always reported as being completely successful.

Echo had always felt an unspoken resentment that she’d died that way, that she’d let love pull her into bad choices. But he’d done the same thing. If he hadn’t cared so much about Allana, his brother would still be alive.

In that moment, he could picture Allana’s features clearly, her gray eyes and her dark-purple lips smiling at him. He remembered the way she wound her arms around his neck and whispered, “How can you two be so different, and yet I have such a hard time deciding who I love best?”

“We’re not different,” he’d said, and laughed because no one ever accused them of that. They were too similar in their looks and speech for everyone. It was the reason Echo had dyed his hair blue and wore the crescent moon, so people could tell him from Joseph, who had left his hair blond and wore only a small blue star on his cheek.

“You are different,” Allana had said, caressing his cheek with her lips. “If you don’t realize that, you don’t know your brother as well as you think you do.”

He pushed the image of Allana away. He never had to see her again. That was the only good thing to come from the ordeal. Allana was dead too.

Echo blinked, bringing himself back to the present. Jeth was demonstrating the computer functions, explaining that although the intellecturate could access any info sites in the city, Taylor and Sheridan needed to ask him before they researched anything. The government monitored searches, so studying the wrong things could get them into trouble. Sheridan watched Jeth, this time with indignation etched on her face.

Echo liked her. He couldn’t help himself. How could he not like someone who was completely genuine, even when it was to her detriment? The way she kept defending her beliefs. The way they mattered to her.

Joseph had been that type of person. At least everyone had thought so. But maybe it never had been true.

He ran his hand through his hair. What kind of person had Joseph really been? It was ironic that he was sitting here thinking about it now and unsure for the first time.

Joseph and Echo. Back when twins weren’t such a rarity, it used to be common to name the second one Echo, but it wasn’t accurate in their case. Echo had never been Joseph’s echo. Never. Echo had always loved life too much to let anyone overshadow him. Echo had been the one who made everyone laugh. Echo had been the one girls were drawn to.

Until Allana.

And then everything changed.

He glanced over at Sheridan. She was sad again, although he’d missed what in the conversation had upset her.

Jeth was showing old family pictures on the computer and explaining how each couple in Traventon was allowed two children—or at least they would be until aging was cured. Then there would be no need for children. Until then, couples could have one boy and one girl. Nothing upsetting in that statement.

Taylor asked the inevitable question. “Then how come you had two sons?”

Jeth ran his fingertips over a picture of Joseph and Echo when they were toddlers. “Identical twins aren’t supposed to happen, but when they do, most people eliminate one of the embryos so they can have a child of each sex. We liked the idea of twins, though. My grandfather was a twin, and he never said it was a bad thing.”

“A bad thing?” Taylor asked. “Why would being a twin be a bad thing?”

Jeth’s gaze flickered toward Echo, then went back to Taylor. “Everyone told us identical twins would have a confused sense of identity, that they would end up hating each other. But that never happened.” Jeth said the words forcefully, almost as though trying to convince himself of this fact. “Joseph and Echo were closer than any siblings I’ve ever known.”

Everyone looked at Echo then. He felt their gazes weighing on him. They expected him to say something, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to say one word, so he nodded mutely, awkwardly.

“I don’t think being a twin is a bad thing,” Sheridan said, drawing the attention away from him. “Except for when Taylor takes my clothes without asking.”

“Hey,” Taylor said, “you’re lucky that you’ve always gotten to hang out with someone as cool as me.”

Jeth straightened, and his gaze ricocheted back and forth between Taylor and Sheridan. He was finally studying their features instead of just noticing their hair and coloring. “Are you twins? Yes, I see that you are. How incredible! Was it common in your day? Did you ever meet triplets?”

Taylor answered his questions. Sheridan glanced back at Echo, and he could read the emotion on her face. Compassion. She was checking to see if he was all right. He managed a half smile to assure her.

What would become of her here in Traventon? Even if she and Taylor escaped the first memory wash order, they would have to find a way to hide their background or they’d end up with a second order.

Sheridan smiled back at him, a smile so infrequent, he knew it was genuine.

Back in the hallway at the Scicenter, she had asked him who she needed protection from. He hadn’t quite been able to tell her the truth, despite her pronouncement that lies didn’t sit comfortably on his tongue. The reason lies didn’t sit comfortably on his tongue was that there were too many of them. It had turned into a crowded place.

Inwardly, he sighed. He would help Sheridan and Taylor while he could, but even though he wanted to stay and learn everything about the past, a clock was set against him. He knew no more about his future than the girls did about theirs.

After hours of conversation, Sheridan told the wordsmiths that she wanted to turn in for the night. And then explained that meant she wanted to sleep.