The Cutting Room: A Time Travel Thriller (11 page)

Despite this, I felt horribly out of place, obviously out of time. I'd never been back this far. We're almost never sent further back than the second half of what is generally classified as the 20th century. Individuals and criminal groups with access to time travel can't penetrate deeper. The expenditure of energy necessary to propel yourself that far back is too obvious. It lights up the Pods like burst stars.

Yet a trespasser was here now.

I guided my beast down the strip of dirt that served as a road. Getting the horses into a Pod had been a story in its own right. Sunlight browned the hills and glazed the ocean. I had a revolver on my hip and a rifle on the saddle. I usually wound up armed when I visited other worlds, but never this publicly.

"What are we looking for again?" Vette said.

I pushed my wide-brimmed hat up my forehead. "How can you not know that?"

"Didn't seem worth learning until we got here."

"Ottoway."

"Who's that?"

"It's not a who, it's a where." My horse stepped funny, bouncing me in the saddle. My whole lower half was going to be sore tomorrow. "That's what Korry Haltur believed, anyway. It was in the G&A files, but there was no modern record of it. Haltur traced it back to here and now."

Vette glanced at me from the corner of her eyes. "Flimsy."

"Like an old shirt. But if someone's here, they could change hundreds of years of history."

A hawk keened from the clear blue sky. She scanned the hardpan. "Guessing there's not a lot of internet around here."

"Not exactly."

"So how do we find...anything?"

"The old fashioned way." Hesitantly, I urged my horse faster toward the dingy town. "We talk to people."

She spat into the dirt. Already in character. "Sounds like a lot of work."

Smoke rose from chimneys, smudging the perfect skies above Brownville, which lived up to its name much better at present than it would three centuries from now. The clank of a smith's hammer drifted from the patchy woods upstream. A uniformed man galloped past us on the trail without sparing us a glance.

I slowed as we approached the tents flung up around the city's edges. It smelled like sulphur and rotting mud. Vette scowled and tied a bandana around her mouth.

"Those are for the trail," I said. "Keep out the dust."

"I'd like to keep out the shit, too."

On the boardwalks outside the nicer shops, filthy men jabbered and joked, backs laden with shovels and picks and rifles and packs. Several eyed Vette. The only dirt on us was what we'd picked up on the ten-mile ride into town. I made a note to tell her to quit bathing. Riders and carriages plowed down the street, careless, trusting the pedestrians to skedaddle out of the way.

I stopped in front of a three-story inn with prices for rooms and whiskey posted out front. Money's always trickier before the digital era—the CR has fewer resources in place, and you can't exactly wire more over if you run low—but the Pods had dummied up several pounds of gold and silver coins along with our clothes and weapons. I stopped my horse, awkwardly lowered myself to the ground, tied my mount to the hitching post, and stepped inside, boots clunking on the planks.

A few men sat around tables with smudgy glasses of beer. Couple more at the bar, where a man with a stupendous salt-and-pepper mustache watched the scene with professional avuncularity. I approached and asked him for a room for me and my wife as well as stabling for our horses. He showed me upstairs and sent a boy out to tend to our mounts. We went to the barn to get our gear off our horses, which smelled like dirt and fresh sweat. Sunlight lanced through the gaps in the wooden walls, impaling swirling motes of dust.

"Your wife?" Vette murmured.

I glanced around to make sure the stableboy was out of earshot. "This age doesn't take kindly to couples in sin. Only way to talk together with the doors closed is if we're married. Otherwise, everyone in town's going to be watching our every move."

"And what about the bed?"

"We've got bedrolls. I'll take the floor."

She nodded, mollified. We brought our stuff up to our room, then returned to the bar, where I ordered us both a beer. The avuncular bartender opened a conversation, which is just what I was hoping would happen.

"Travel far?" he said, voice heavy with the deep timbre of a rolling ship.

"Oakwood," I said, naming a town a couple hundred miles east. Even the Pods didn't know too much about this time and place—they're passive gatherers of information who do much better in digital eras; when you observe a thing too closely, you change it, which is anathema to our mission—but they'd put together enough backstory for us to pass. Hopefully.

"What brings you to Brownville?"

I sipped my beer, which tasted earthy but was mostly good. "I'm not entirely sure."

The man laughed. The glint of his teeth beneath his wide whiskers made him look feral. "Hell of a long way to ride, then."

Other than the organic cameras in my eyes, we had no way to spy on the people here. Normally, I preferred to follow the Pods' lead and stay back, exposing nothing, but that wasn't an option. I took a calculated risk.

"Looking for Ottoway." I leaned forward and dropped my voice. "Pretty sure it's hereabouts."

He cocked his head to the side, hands on the scarred wooden bar. "Ottoway."

"You know it?"

The man thought a moment, then shook his head. "Nope. But that don't mean it ain't here."

I nodded and considered the bar. "We're like to stay here a while. If it comes up, you'll let us know?"

"Sure. A man's got to take care of the people under his roof."

In Primetime, this would have been delivered ironically, a commentary on a patriarchy so outdated it hardly qualified as a joke, but the man's expression was as solid as his bar. I smiled and extended my hand. We shook. The man walked down to see to a new customer.

"What now?" Vette said. "Or are you hoping to find answers in the bottom of that mug?"

"Nope. But maybe in the bottom of one I buy for the other people here."

She sighed into her beer. "Two weeks won't be nearly enough, will it?"

The light spilling through the bubbly glass of the windows was firm and yellow, but the earliness of the afternoon hour did nothing to dissuade men from ordering themselves a glass or four. The locals were grimy, hands callused, dirt worked deep in the folds of their necks and faces. They looked rough, but most were happy to accept a drink on someone else's coin, and to talk at length about where they'd been and the land they knew so well. No matter how long they'd lived here or how much they'd seen, none knew about Ottoway.

After a couple fruitless hours, I made my way out back to the water closet. It was tight and smelled terrible. A bucket of corncobs sat in the corner. I didn't put together what they were for until I was on my way back to the saloon.

Inside the splintery wooden door, I hardly recognized Vette. Her hair was curled, cunningly pinned in place, elegant against her simple doeskin jacket. My eyes made even less sense of the broad-shouldered man standing next to her in the act of reaching for her hip.

She didn't say a word, just snapped her elbow into his chin. His teeth clacked; he staggered. A couple men at a nearby table looked as if they couldn't decide whether to laugh or stomp on their hats in outrage. The man steadied himself, wiped the blood from his mouth, and stalked back toward Vette. She bent her knees and raised her guard in the Kone Position. The man was about to die.

He froze, as if reading the careful alignment of her Academy-honed muscles.

I stepped up and murmured into his ear. "No matter how the next ten seconds play out, they make you less of a man."

He swung his head toward me. His eyes were dark, suspicious as a stray dog's. As hungry, too. "Bitch hit me first."

Vette twitched. I glared at her, then softened my look and raised my eyebrows at the man. "That 'bitch' is my wife. And I'm lucky if
I
can touch her without pulling back a stump."

He snorted. "Don't envy you."

"Laugh all you want. On the trail, there's nobody I'd rather have at my back."

"Even so. Don't take kindly to being struck."

"Let me soothe the ache with liquid anesthetic." I gestured to the bartender, who moved into action as if he'd been waiting for my signal, pouring a couple fingers of whiskey into two glasses. I found Vette's eyes and gestured upstairs. She shook her head, searched the ceiling, then headed for the wooden staircase to the second floor.

The man, who'd decided to save face figuratively and literally, set his elbows on the bar next to me and accepted his drink. "Hell of an elbow she's got. For the record, I didn't know the lady was married."

I didn't ask why that made a difference. "She's tough. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes I don't."

"Suppose sharing the pants makes the laundry easier." He laughed but stuck out his hand, which was as scaly and worn as the bluffs of basalt ringing the basin. "Name's Mabry."

We talked a spell, as they say, about Brownville, how it was growing, the potential of the plains and hills. I told him one day it would be big enough to rival anything back East.

"Don't know about that," he said, itching his beard. "But one of these days we might get ourselves a school."

Mabry was a prospector, lured here three years ago by the glint of gold. Brownville had been a quarter the size then, he said. A mean place where a woman couldn't walk down the street and a man had best run too. Much better these days, he allowed, although now and then a jagged rock of the frontier poked through the blanket of civilization that had arrived with the entrepreneurs selling boots and tools and women to the prospectors.

He didn't know where or what Ottoway was, either, and he knew every worm under every rock in the territory (although at this point he was saturated enough to make the same claim about the moon). The sun cut through the uneven windows, turning the sawdust golden yellow. I checked my pocketwatch.

"Better get back upstairs before my wife declares me dead and remarries." I stood, a little unsteady. "If I've got more questions, can I come to you?"

"As long as you're buying, I'm talking."

We shook hands again. I wavered up the stairs to the creaking boards of the second floor. Inside our room, Vette lay on the bed, boots dangling off the edge.

"Have fun?" she said.

"I was gathering intel."

"You smell like whiskey."

I shed my coat. "Hazard of the trade."

"Is this how it's going to be? You stagger around some dirty bar while I wait upstairs like a caged bird?"

I squinted at her. "Listen, you're the one throwing elbows. You don't want to get ushered backstage, then act like a proper wife."

She snorted. "Then why don't
you
act like my husband?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"What kind of proper man lets his woman get felt up by some yokel whose beard looks grafted from the back of a bear? I'm supposed to stand there and take it?"

"Of course not."

"Then let me be me." She rolled off the bed and stalked to the window. "If I punch out some dirty old miner, it isn't going to suddenly convince these people women should have the vote."

"Message received." I pressed the heels of my palms against my back and stretched. I hoped we didn't have to do any more riding soon. "I talked him around to our side, so we've got a local contact now. For whatever good it will do us. Nobody seems to know what Ottoway is."

"Maybe we're in the wrong when."

"We just got here. 'Ottoway' could be code or a reference to something that hasn't happened yet. But if the daisu came here, it's to change something. That's what we're looking for."

"Let's hope it's a little more obvious than the ol' flap of a butterfly." She eyed a carriage clapping down the rutted street. "So what's our next step?"

"Homework." I went to my saddlebag and pulled out my bible. "Then we'll hit the streets. Get a feel for town."

The book was heavy and looked years old despite being printed by the Pods minutes before we left. It was filled with every primary source document of the period the Pod had been able to scrape together, which wasn't much; the machines had no physical presence here, and were reliant on tapping into the networks of the digital age to cull information. Even so, the book, with its smell of leather, paper, and must, contained several hundred pages of newspaper articles, longhand letters, and lists of names, places, and events. Nothing after the present date, of course. Couldn't risk contaminating them with the knowledge of their own future.

In practice, this meant we were three-quarters blind. The book's records were as spotty as an uncertain rain. Unlikely to hold any answers. I paged through it anyway. Besides what I'd seen in movies and experienced during our pre-jump AVI training, I knew virtually nothing about the Frontier Era, let alone this world's particular path through it. Wouldn't hurt to brush up.

I sat in the lumpy chair and plowed in. Vette reclined on the bed, leafing back and forth through her own book. According to the letters and articles, Brownville was bursting with gold. One clipping claimed you had to walk down the streets with a pan on your head lest a nugget fall from the sky and knock you out cold. The vim and excitement of the newspaper clippings were at stark odds with the personal letters, which detailed hard work and mounting disappointment punctuated by gold strikes that always turned out more shallow and short-lived than the writers' initial reports.

Such violent swings of optimism and depression caught me off guard. Not that we don't have little things like emotions in Primetime. But reading these letters—some of which, relative to my current time, had been written just days earlier—I was struck with an ocean-deep sense of yearning for and belief in a future without limit. The lure and fear of the frontier, I supposed. The potential of the unknown. In Primetime, there's no corner of the map that hasn't been marked a thousand times. We don't know our future or anything like that, but wherever you're born, you're guaranteed a healthy life free of physical want.