The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (50 page)

Peron had departed from an apartment near 30th and Downing, apartment destroyed in fire of suspicious origin. That was unsurprising. It takes time to build an illegal time machine and prepare to use it, so he’d taken a place in the bad side of town under another name, and then probably firebombed it just after the ballast came through. That was a pretty common trick, not least because it forced the ballast to run instead of doing the natural thing and holing up in the place where the time machine had been. Horejsi and me had caught eight ballasts who had barely had a second to realize they were naked or in rags, bleeding and hurt, in a strange place, before the room had gone up in flames and they’d fled for their lives into the street.

30th and Downing was a logical place – in the scummy boho end of town, where many Liejt had apartments for mistresses or for drug parties, and near a levrail station where gravitic power was easy to steal with just an Edison tube of mercury for an antenna.

We could have had the case the day after he left. The Royal Temporal Division had measured the power draw, mass, and cyl-enc but hadn’t seen fit to tell us till we asked, and of course we hadn’t asked till we detected it by our methods, which meant not until after anomalies began to accumulate and casopropagate forward around the disappearance of Peron’s ballast. That was typical; RTD cops gave no cooperation to anyone, least of all us feebs.

“So,” I said, “just rechecking your memory with mine; we have it that Peron had no prior record of experimenting with time machines, but given that you can make one out of three old radios and any pre-1985 ultrasonic clothes-cleaner – ”

She nodded. “And he could have gotten the physics from the tweenweb – plenty of articles there. Or with his confidential background, and being from a Liejt family, good odds he’s a high-level physicist or mathematician.”

She turned another card. “This is the longest kinegraph of him they can find, and it’s only about forty seconds. He liked tango, so he made it to most of the Argentú clubs here in town.”

I watched; faces are all alike, but I remember gaits.

Peron sent his partner through a quick, neat boleo and led her out in a nice cruzada; he took good care of her axis without fussing about it, and I could tell his lead was firm and clear (letting her look good), but not very imaginative (he didn’t particularly make her look good). “He’s good,” I said. “But not great.”

“You . . . dance?” She sounded equally astonished on each word. Add one more declarative statement to things she knew.

“Yeah. I met Peron; we danced in some of the same places. He was around for a while – till a few months ago, in fact.” I looked at the kinegraph more closely. “You sure can tell he’s been gone for nine months, can’t you? His face is blurring badly. I don’t really remember it well, either, but I don’t think that’s an effect of the time travel; I think I just never paid much attention to him.”

“You’d know him if you saw him again?”

“Yeah, no question. If they drop me back for an exchange, I can do it. Mention it in your daily to the FBI, but they aren’t going to want to try. My fuzzy memory is bound to be better than that kinegraph, so combust it.”

Brak. Horejsi pulled out the next card. “Peron had a lot of friends.”

“How many?”

“Forty-one identified.”

“That’s a lot for you or me, not so much for a regular social dancer.”

“Sounded like a lot.”

“Always give me the number.”

“Sorry, Rastigevat. You’re right.” She was checking me, opening apertures to see if I was upset with her, so I smiled and nodded to let her know it was okay. That was Horejsi, always worrying whether I liked her.

Better to get her off that worry. I asked, “So, forty-one friends, in what kind of relationships?”

“Very casual, all of them. Hanging out, bars and movies together, that kind of thing. Nine from dancing, thirty-two from Specthink, which is a philosophy e-kiosk on tweenweb. Now his old cronies on Specthink are arguing about who he was, where he went, and so on.”

“May I look at the card?”

She handed it over. I could listen to Horejsi try to explain a table of numbers all month and not learn anything; she just didn’t see numbers. If she let me look and then explain to her, we both knew a lot more.

Frequency of contact, frequency of mention, and trust in mention all showed the usual pattern after someone jumps back: his friends were talking about him less and less, being troubled by not quite remembering Old Whatsisname. In the last three months, four of them had decided he was a hoax invented by the rest of the group, and five more were sympathetic to that view. He had been the most frequently quoted member of his personal web; 85 per cent of quotes originating with him had already been reattributed. “Popular guy,” I said. “But one of the things I like about the dance communities, you don’t have to talk more than you want to, and most people prefer it if you don’t get too involved with each other. And it’s nice precise exercise. I love all that. So since I didn’t dance with him and wasn’t much of a talker, I just didn’t interact with him much. The only thing I remember is that there were always people around him. I think I’d recognize him from his gait, though. If he came back.”

“You don’t think we’ll retrieve him.”

“No way. He has almost already gotten away with it. It’s a miracle the random searches found him when they did; whatever Peron has done, it’s already melding with reality. There’s going to be uproar, I’m afraid.”

Her apertures opaqued and she rubbed the back of her head. “Shit.”

Horejsi hates uproar. Me, I barely notice it.

Six hundred years ago, in the One Great Lecture of 1403, Francis Tyrwhitt articulated the theory of indexical derivability, and after his death, his eleven students carried the work on. In 1421, a six-page calculation overthrew all of Aristotelian mechanics and Ptomelaic astronomy, and told them how to build the telescopes and chronometers with which to confirm it. In 1429, Marlow discovered the periodic table of the elements, valence, and carbon chains in his calculations in a single thick codex; Tyrwhitt’s last living student, Christopher Berkeley Maxwell, laid out the basic equations of electromagnetism in the notes found in his rooms after his death.

Indexical derivability made all things inevitable. Once you had its fourteen definitions, seven axioms, and forty-one basic theorems, from then on if you could describe what you wanted to do, it was just a matter of doing the steps, deriving the equations (or proving that no equations could be derived, which was equivalent to absolute impossibility), and then solving them. Solving them was a bastard, of course. Newton worked all his life, without success, to unify relativity and quantum.

Then just under 200 years ago, Babbage saw how to use deoxyribonucleic acid to solve equations; after that, any Liejt sixteen-year-old, if his allowance would cover a few tubes of chemicals from the school supplies at Office Matt’s plus an ordinary amino-acid sequencer from the pet store, could unify quantum physics and relativity in about three days. You still needed the occasional genius to explain what the right question was – it wasn’t till Einstein that people really understood what time travel would mean or require – but once you could ask a question intelligently, it was only a matter of a few hours to learn whatever you wanted. As for building whatever you dreamed up, with such a variety of tech stuff out there, if you had a Liejt ID, you could probably get the parts from any junkyard or hobby store.

The universe still is what it is. Turns out questions like, “How can I love my neighbor?” are impossible to write in a soluble form, but “How can I make a really big bomb?” and “How can I go back and change the past?” are easy – just slap it together following the directions that come out of the tube and off you go.

Luckily by far the most common jumpers are the ones who are trying to cheat intemporia – the ones who jump back to give their earlier selves a bit of good advice or to take a different turn in the road. Too close to their departure point, there’s so little room for casopropagation that the most likely consequences are fatal accidents or little “Appointment in Samara” lessons (often both simultaneously). It doesn’t matter how often people hear that the universe is imperfectly reality-conservative, favoring whatever results in the least displacement, in Einstein’s famous formulation. All they hear is “imperfectly” and “favoring” – like the Serpent whispering Thou shalt not surely die.

The short-term jumpers, the ones who go back five or thirty years, all think the stochastic exceptions the universe makes will be made in their direction, and that they’ll be really happy if they just try to kiss Esther, or pop Bart in the nose when he shoves them in the hall, or buy Plum Computer when it’s cheap; and each short term jumper is always the only person surprised when it turns out that actually nothing much changes even if they live and we don’t catch them.

The exception to that was that Federal authorities could do a quick, simple edit, when someone crossed a boundary that must never be crossed. In such cases it worked because, honestly, if you changed people, you changed a lot of things, but if you just deleted them, generally you didn’t. Most of us don’t like to know how disposable we are, but there you have it. If us Feds didn’t like what people were doing now, we’d eliminate them at some time back in the past, and history would close around the little space they had taken up – not “as if they had never been” – but just plain, they had never been.

Only freak-memory social isolates like me and Horejsi would recall it. That was part of how the FBI found us. Say a Com’n boy developed a crush on his personal slave. You couldn’t punish him for that; he was higher. To punish and forbid meant admitting it was possible to cross the boundary. So you made it that it never had been crossed; a Federal agent took a short hop back and the slave girl had some quick, painless accident as a small girl, and the boy’s family was warned to find more appropriate slaves.

But if three weeks after she ceased to exist, the boy was asking about her, you knew you had someone who had that kind of memory; you could fix him by having him talk to a lot of people, but if he wouldn’t do that, he would be either an FBI agent, or someone who needed sequestering.

There were rumors that for some cases there were many, many people who needed elimination. I had met one older agent who had once told me of having had to eliminate four generations into the past to get rid of a Diana Spencer, but he didn’t say for what; I gathered it involved a Royal person, and noting that the old man telling the tale was drunk, stopped him before he said more. Shortly after that conversation, the man vanished, but perhaps he just died and I didn’t hear about it. I never asked around to see if anyone remembered him.

As for me, there was a sad, soft spot in my heart for LaNella, who I think was a Free nurse I must have preferred to my own mother (so many Liejt boys do – we’re too young to understand the consequences and after all we see the nurse for hours every day, and Mama for perhaps two hours on Sunday). If it wasn’t all a dream, then LaNella ceased to be while I was away at school for my first year, and when I came home at Christmas and asked for her, they took me to meet a nice man who promised I could be an FBI agent when I grew up.

So altering recent history was really nothing: the government did it all the time, whenever it was convenient. Private individuals tried it all the time, and either failed (because they didn’t have the government’s resources or simplicity of intention) or succeeded without changing much. It was illegal for private citizens, and they eliminated Free and Com’n people to prevent the violation’s ever happening, and the fine for Liejts doing it was outrageous. But though the penalties were harsh for short term jumps back in time, in truth there was little harm or difference made, whether we caught them or not.

There was also little harm from anyone jumping into deep history; if you leaped back and assassinated Alexander, there might be a wild divergence for as much as 200 years, but the immense, massive intemporia of the whole time stream would find its way back to its old bed, and if you went back to, say, the Younger Dryas, whatever you did would be utterly undone – paleobiological expeditions were common school projects.

But every now and then someone decided to change something in meso-history, which meant the causal delta hits its maximum near the present. Whenever that happened, the first time the Federal Bureau of Isotemporality knew anything, a couple of battles had reversed their outcomes, the linguistic lines between English, Fransche, Russky, and Espano in the Armoricas had moved hundreds of miles, the Untitled States of Armorica had gained or lost ten states, and there was a Yorkist on the Confederate throne again.

The physics could have turned out worse. If the rate of casopropagation were uniform, continuous, instantaneous, or forward-causality conservative – any one of them would have done it – then after each past-changing trip, we’d instantly be in that other world, millions or billions of us would cease to exist and be replaced by someone else, everyone’s new memory would conform to everyone else’s, and the world would go on without even a fart in time.

Fortunately for those of us who like to go on existing, Einstein showed that casopropagation is stochastic, discrete, metatemporal, and biased toward zero change but not strictly conservative.

Mesohistorical time travelers nearly always wanted to come back to somewhere around the time they left, and the changes they made were reversible until they did, so they found a living human to be their ballast body. If you used an inert ballast body, say a load of mud from a riverbank or a fallen log from a forest, the trackers would find it right there at the place where your time machine took off, and disconnect its causal relation to you (dispersing and destructuring it – blow it up, burn it, grind it up and scatter it). You’d just have pointlessly ceased to exist.