No Early Birds: A Short Story (3 page)

              "I've gotten over that idea, Vi. It seemed like a good idea when it first popped into my head. But I can see after thinking on it that it is really dangerous," Edna admitted.

              "I'm glad. I didn't think it would be good for you or him, but it's better you figured that out on your own without us brow beating you."

              "Oh, you wouldn't do that. Maybe Faye a little, if I took too long to clue up on it," she admitted. Faye just looked amused and didn't seem offended. "Looking back we had as good a day as I could wish. We stayed in all day, and at the last it was hard for Mark to go out. We didn't argue about anything. I never could keep a secret from the man. If I went back I'd be making a mess of myself trying to find special things to do to show I loved him. He'd get all suspicious and know something was up. He'd probably think I spent money on something foolish or put a ding in the car. No, the quiet day we had will do just fine. He always did tell me he loved me a couple times a day. Not like some men, who are so cold. It would be cruel if he figured out I knew he wouldn't see the next dawn. He never morbidly dwelt on the idea himself even though he knew he was seriously ill. I'm past the idea and OK, truly."

              "I've been thinking about it," Anna said quietly. "I'm comfortable as things stand, but anything we wish to do may require funding, so I'm interested, not in becoming
filthy
rich, or altering the future economy so heavily that we call attention to ourselves, but I would like to use the machine to improve our economic standing."

              "I agree," Faye cut in. "I have something particular in mind. I figure from what I read that there are going to be medical advances in the near future that will stop a lot of the effects of aging. If we can find out what they are, and maybe slip ahead and get treatment, there's no reason why we can't make sure we don't have to suffer from Alzheimer's or heart disease or cancer. But we might have to pay for treatments if we don't have the same sort of health insurance in the future, or if it's too hard for our younger selves to walk in and use our real identity."

              "We can go to the public library and do a lot of research," Edna suggested. "I don't want to look on the computer from home. I don't think it's possible to be private enough. I get ads for things sometimes that are like they are reading my mind. You know we can't just take our car forward five or ten years, and drive around town. The License plates would be expired and our insurance proof would be no good. Even my driver's license expires in three years, but if we transition in time to the library parking lot we don't have to go out on the road at all."

              "That's a good idea dear. Even the ladies who owned this little machine used a rental car. Going the other way would be hard too. Wouldn't it be kind of obvious to show up in a car that wouldn't be for sale for years? And we'd have to find an old plate that wouldn't match if the police checked it. But I think it would be easier to take counsel of those most interested in our success," Anna told her.

              "Who's that?"

              "Why, our future selves. All we have to do is come back and drop a letter in a mailbox. We can tell ourselves what works and what pitfalls to avoid without jumping blindly into the future," Anna said a bit smugly. "That's undoubtedly why I had this letter in my mail box today. It says, "Save to share after dinner." on the flap in my own hand, but I don't remember sending it. It must be from a future me."

We all stared at the common number ten envelope like it was a space alien.

              "Well open the damn thing," Faye insisted. "I can't believe you didn't rip it open the minute you found it."

              "But I didn't want to." She pointed out reasonably. "I mean the future me didn't want me to. Lord, it gets confusing knowing which me we're talking about." She was ripping it open as she spoke which was good. If she hadn't Faye looked ready to explode out of her chair and snatch it out of her hand. She pulled out several sheets and a couple other flat items, and read to us.

* * *

             
Hello Girls, this is by Anna's hand with input from us all.

              We won't be using the mail in the future. They lose too many letters and people in the Sarasota office are ripping open letters and looking for money in envelopes. There will be a big fuss about it in the paper and on TV in about a year. We shall leave things under Anna's welcome mat or use FedEx.

              Edna has a small tumor in her right breast that required a lumpectomy and she has been fine since, no problem. However if you wish to avoid the whole upsetting ordeal here is a little blister card of pills. Take one a day until they are gone and the matter will never come up. We don't know here what they are. They came back to us from up-time.

              Enclosed is a separate list of stock trades to make. Note these are all buy and sell instructions. Later when you have more money we will be telling you a small number of stocks to buy and hold. Don't buy more than you are told. Being greedy may deprive someone of shares who used them as the basis for a personal fortune or to reinvest in a business that is an important part of our reality.

              Just as early birds snatch up everything good at a sale, we are told from our future that early bird time travelers can ruin things for everybody else. That is why you must be discrete. Eventually, after time travel is discovered there will be alternate banes of reality created that should not have come into existence. Some are sufficiently nasty that there are a sort of police who trim out the nastier ones by intervention. That had to wait on better tech that allows traveling between less similar realities. By the time somebody could do that some of the unpleasant alternates had progressed long enough to be difficult to eradicate.

              That is not something done lightly, because sometimes the agent of such an action disappears with the prohibited bane. We want to be the sort of innocuous early birds that they look at as not worth the risk and effort to eliminate because we are too intertwined in events to remove easily and there is no real benefit apparent from doing so.

              To help you understand, some early travelers did make changes that resulted in dictatorships or horrible wars. The sad thing is almost all those actions were the result of well intended interventions. Making a little money or helping an ordinary person almost never hurts anything. But trying to reform a political system, or create a theocracy will almost always go bad. Even things that sound like a wonderful idea such as stamping out poverty or insuring universal health care can turn quickly to the bad because we simply don't know enough to foresee all the consequences of our actions. Trust us on this, because it is the word from far up the time line. They say some such branches are there forever and can't be 'pruned'.

              You don't want to be a lotto winner. That is too significant an event. But one of you can choose a number that matches all but one digit which pays out about $25k. on a buck wager. Bet four dollars please. After taxes, this is seed money for all of you to use as instructed. No need for any of you to front investment money. If all of you won above this level it would be too obvious. Enclosed find lower prize winning numbers written down for the next four months. Have Faye buy them for you, and each turn one in, because she is already in the habit of buying a lotto ticket every week anyway."

              We will send another packet in a few weeks. Just do all the things you usually enjoy. Some of them will be lost in time and you might as well enjoy them while you can. For example the Waffle House will close in about five years because the land was just worth too much money for that use and they sold it to built an office park there. We double back and enjoy a Waffle House now and then, but there are a finite number and none of them are
our
Waffle House. But don't feel too bad, we found another really cute place to go in our time.

All for now,

Anna

* * *

              "Well, how exciting. Do you want these dear?" Anna offered the pills to Edna.

              "You bet. I trust us not to send something back that isn't safe." She took them and put them in her purse, looking a little rattled.

              "And for you," she gave a slip of paper with some numbers to Faye. "I didn't know you played the lotto."

              "I never tell anybody because it's a sucker's game." Faye admitted. "At least it was with me picking the numbers."

              "Here's my dollar," Edna said taking it from her wallet. "Just because it will make big bucks doesn't mean it's fair to make you pay the four bucks for all of us." We all scrambled to do the same. Fair is fair. I should have thought of it without being told.

* * *

              Anna's husband was a stock broker when she married him, and then later in life he got involved with investment banking. She learned enough from him she still actively managed her own accounts, so she set us up an investment account with all four of us as joint tenants.

Some of the things we were instructed to buy seemed downright silly. A toy manufacturer? Really? And then the computer screen maker, something we thought a very mature business. But then there was the fad of wearing video t-shirts, using tech the screen maker invented. It didn't last long but we made a ton of money off a very small share while it lasted. Not that that was the end of the company. I have one of their dresses for evening wear, and can set it to red silk or blue velvet, violet with gold diamonds or floral designs. It's almost impossible to run into someone at a party wearing the same thing.

The first couple decades after we got the machine every one of us benefited from medical advice, and twice had medicine sent back to us. The investment advice less often but it was still very effective. It wasn't unusual to go a month without any communication. Once we were told to drive up to Atlanta and take clothing for a couple weeks when a supposedly weak hurricane turned out to be more serious than expected.

We kept expecting to watch the news one day and see them announce that somebody had invented time travel. After all, the little device had English words and familiar characters on the screen we could understand. We also wondered about how long it would run. There wasn't anything that looked like solar cells on it. There was a seam all the way around the edges, but none of us thought it was a good idea to peek and see if it used batteries. Then in the next note we were told not to worry about it.

We underestimated the power of the media to slow the change of language. It was a shock in time when German became an extinct language of scholars. Slang of course, changes. But it also usually goes away and is forgotten. I remember when I was middle aged, I had a cousin who was horribly needy. If you went to a family reunion she'd latch onto you like a leech and ruin your visit. Back then we said she 'glommed onto you'. Currently you'd just say she is 'sticky'. It'll be different in fifty years, but the core words endure.

One of the first clues we had just how far in the future time travel would be discovered was when we got an uptime communication that wasn't for us, but to relay. We immediately recognized it as one we'd read before, but subtly different. The uptime us didn't trust their memory of the older English usage to say what they wanted clearly. They were right too. We changed three words. It would have sounded slightly odd without the editing.

When we all moved to the moon it seemed a huge step. Earth was too difficult for four old ladies to live on and be different than the folks around them. Even when everybody was living to near two hundred, being four hundred got to be difficult to cover up. Especially when governments got very controlling, which they did twice very badly before we left. The only thing that got us through that is that we had money. Fortunately, it a universal law of human nature that you don't look too closely at wealthy people and their dealings.

When we got a chatty letter of instructions one day it was still from the moon, but Anna mentioned she felt bad that our old home in Florida was not only viewed as sort of slummy, but that the shape of the coast had changed. The same cities weren't all there, and it was a province now instead of a state. But they still called it Florida. That made us realize we were in for a very long haul. When people lived on or around other planets in our solar system we were sure the time machine would be invented soon. It wasn't.

At various times we wondered if we had exceeded our limits to change and created our own time branch, but then we got a message to settle that saying we were OK and not to worry about it. The same message said the future had told them there were other branches too bizarre to understand. So different our line couldn't honestly decide whether to intervene in them, because they really couldn't understand them.

We're content we haven't attracted the attention of the time police. None of us have done anything important enough that this time line would find us irreplaceable. Not to mention we're glad we didn't happen to be in one of the branches where humans altered themselves like we told ourselves about. We like being upright and bipedal. We could go back to Bradenton and nobody would notice anything odd about us. But of course we all look about thirty now. It's a very good age to appear. Very rarely, we visit a Waffle House when we visit Earth. We ration that because there are only so many Waffle House days in existence. We can go a bit more often since we don't look like the four old ladies who might have been there just yesterday.