The Revisionists (3 page)

I use a towel to clean up the last of the blood from the base of the tree. The towel too I toss in the river, which darkly glitters at me like tinfoil. I must seem like some odd throwback, not to this time but an even earlier one, what they once called prehistory, when strange little cringers offered sacrifices to sea gods they themselves had invented, throwing possessions of varying import into the murky waters. Praying for a calm and fecund world without flood, a land of everlasting peace.

There are so many questions I didn’t think to ask when I was offered this job. They knew I was interested from the start, even though their recruitment was so heavy on flattery that I figured there was something they weren’t telling me. It’s hard to pay attention to what isn’t being said, however, when what
is
being said is so mind-altering. It was an honor, something that could not be refused.

I’ve been thinking about that lately, about whether I could indeed have refused. About how much free choice there had been, whether my hand had been forced or had moved of its own accord. What is predetermined, what spontaneous? You get to thinking about such things after this long on the job. You start pondering options that most people don’t even realize are there, seeing secret paths and hidden escapes. Or the opposite happens: you see the larger forces that guide you against your will or without your knowledge. If you are what you do, then what does it mean if others make the decisions for you?

My previous three gigs were in a different beat, back in the 1940s. One of the things I never thought to ask was how long the average Protector stays on the job. Given the amount of training and expertise necessary for a person to navigate a beat, transfers must be rare. But my current assignment wasn’t so much a transfer, they told me, as a response to an unexpected development. The Department of Historical Integrity was created when the Government realized that revolutionary factions had access to the technology and could navigate time themselves, and since its inception the Department has done an excellent job of determining which Events the hags would target. First the hags tried to alter World War II, focusing in particular on the Holocaust. That had been my beat. The hags wanted to prevent the genocide—they were a Jewish extremist group, though I suppose that’s a redundancy. They wanted to save those millions of innocent lives. An admirable goal. But that would have altered history. Meaning, it would have altered our Perfect Present. The Department’s motto, engraved on the crest that every Protector walks across upon admission to headquarters (a headquarters no one else knows exists, for a Department no one else knows exists), is
The integrity of history must be preserved
.

I protect Events that no one in my forward-thinking time knows about. We Protectors are the silent warriors, toiling in a vacuum. We stop the hags from removing the pillars of our Perfect Society and tearing it all down. What would have happened if Napoleon had been killed as a little boy? Or if Mao hadn’t unleashed his Cultural Revolution? Or if bin Laden hadn’t hurled airplanes like darts at his global targets? The hags’ argument is that lives would be saved and tragedies averted, and they’re right, in their shortsighted way. They choose to overlook the fact that such changes would destroy our Perfect Present, meaning that the Great Conflagration, or some similar event, would still be happening, and the suffering would never end. All the problems we’ve solved, all the broken aspects of society we’ve fixed, all the efforts we’ve made to eliminate human meanness and frailty—these accomplishments must be protected, no matter the cost.

After watching the dead hags bob along the river, I drive into the city. My mind is wandering across subjects, across time, thinking of my wife and the home that I will never again visit, when I’m startled by the GeneScan. It turns on suddenly, but it’s not working as it should. I see dots and blips and streaks everywhere, the world before me fractured into a universe of constellations, as unreadable as the stars above.

I swerve out of my lane, distracted. Some of the dots vanish, but one lingers; the GeneScan seems to be telling me there’s a hag close by. That’s not in my intel, though. I have a detailed agenda of the hags’ targets; I hadn’t expected anything else tonight, and nothing in this particular neighborhood. Perhaps I’ve stumbled upon the hags’ hiding spot—a fortuitous occurrence, as it would give me an opportunity to snuff them all out. I was that lucky in Poland once, finding the distant barn from which they were planning their bombings of Nazi rail lines; I eliminated them with a late-night fire and some well-placed rifle shots, my easiest gig ever.

I do my best to follow the GeneScan, trying to link it to my internal GPS. It doesn’t work. The geographical info that the Logistics people provided to me was the best they could find, but that doesn’t mean much. The Archives themselves are imperfect, full of errors or taken from the wrong year. Excavators and dump trucks are parked all over this neighborhood, sudden detours rendering my maps useless, the trucks tearing down buildings and creating new ones. It’s sad to watch people so painstakingly build this world.

Then I see police lights in my rearview. Annoyed at the fried circuits in my brain, I manage to turn off the unhelpful GeneScan as I pull over.

The cops walk toward my car, one on either side. I’ve been driving with my windows halfway down, and I wonder how badly I smell of alcohol. And gun smoke.

“License and registration,” says the cop to my left. He is amazingly white. His skin seems to glow, illuminated by the headlights of passing cars. I’ve adjusted during my different gigs, grown more accustomed to how pale the “white” people look and how dark the “black” people, but still, the racial markers are so odd here. It’s like being asked to describe the taste of something cooked with ingredients one has never heard of; there are no touchstones, no points of reference. Just foreignness and wonder.

I hand him my driver’s license and the rental agreement. Identity theft was a big problem in this beat, and the Logistics people make use of such tricks in constructing covers. They peer through old files and computer systems—whatever survived the Great Conflagration and the many wars afterward and then the long decay of time—to find names that can be lifted, data that can be transferred, lives that can be stolen. They choose people we can “replace” by finding those who vanished or disappeared, those who died mysteriously, those whose records outlived them for a few days.

The license says my name is Troy Jones and that I hail from Philadelphia. Within the Department, I go by Zed, and I don’t really live anywhere.

He looks over my information, and I realize:
These could be hags.

Adopting covers as cops would be impressive, something beyond what they’ve done in the past. I turn the GeneScan back on, but it lights up suddenly and then, as if overwhelmed by the pressure, flickers off. I try again but nothing happens; my trusty sidekick has made an early exit from this adventure.

I notice the cops have unsnapped the holsters on their sidearms. I’m not sure if that’s a routine move in traffic stops here. My own gun is in the glove box and might as well be a mile away.

The other cop stands to the right of my car. I can’t see his face, only his midsection, a ballooning that suggests the physical requirements for officers in this era aren’t as stringent as in my time. He shines a flashlight into the Corolla, the beam lingering on the lightweight jacket that rests on the seat beside me.

“Anything under that jacket, sir?” He sounds older than the first cop, tired.

“No, Officer.”

“Lift it real slow and show me.”

I obey. Then he beams the backseat. Without the GeneScan to rely on, I feel momentarily adrift, a traveler dazed after losing his translator in a busy market.

“Is there something wrong, Officers?”

“You disobeyed a yield sign, Mr. Jones, and you switched lanes without signaling,” says the cop holding my license.

“I’m very sorry. I’m a little lost.” I choose a random address a few blocks away and tell him I’ve been trying to find it. “I’m not from around here.”

“I see that. Interesting accent too, you don’t mind my saying so.” That hurts more than he realizes—I spent days working on the voice, listening to old audio and watching video that the Archives people turned up, studying the contemp cadence and flow.

“You don’t really look like a Jones to me,” the other one says, leaning down to shine his light in my face.

I look away from the light, back at cop number one. “I have a complicated family tree.”

“What brings you to Washington, Mr. Jones?”

“I’m a defense contractor in town for some meetings. I’m trying to find the office of one of my colleagues for a strategy session.”

That cover was chosen for its vague air of mystery and severity, I was told. But the cops do not seem impressed. “A defense contractor? Really.”

“Pretty late for a strategy session, isn’t it?” the other one asks.

“Strategy is a twenty-four-hour thing in the defense industry,” I say. “Plus I did get a bit delayed on the drive down.”

“We take defense strategy awfully seriously here in the District as well.”

“Exactly what kind of strategy are you and your colleagues hatching, Mr. Jones?”

I wasn’t expecting this reaction. I think for a moment, wondering what I did wrong.

“I can’t really go into detail,” I say. “I can say that it’s intelligence related.”

They wait a beat. “So if you’re going to a business meeting to discuss your strategy, shouldn’t you have some business papers?”

“They’re in my trunk.”

“Mind if we take a look?”

“You can look there if you’d like, Officer, but the papers themselves are classified.”

The fat cop laughs, an odd thing to witness since I still can’t see his face. I make a note of the name clipped to his dark blue shirt and do the same for his partner, for my Report of Historical Contacts. He says to his partner, “Can’t tell if we’ve pulled over Zawahiri or Colin Powell.”

The names register in my Contemporary Persons, Locations, and Events file, linked to my brain via the implanted chip. It’s almost like memory, but not quite. Takes a second. Even if the names hadn’t been familiar, I’d still have understood—regardless of era or culture or language, all insults sound the same. The cops are having a hard time figuring out my race, their gut-level mistrust of intelligent-sounding darkies mixing with their fear of Arabic evil. My superiors told me that to the eyes of a white contemp, I might look like a “very light-skinned African American” or a “Pacific Islander” or someone “interestingly multiracial.”

The second officer leans down and I can see his face for the first time. Like his partner, he’s as white as anything I’ve ever seen that isn’t dead. I glance at his thick cheeks and red, glassy eyes for an instant before he shines his flashlight at me and I look away.

“Sir,” he says, “I’m asking you to pop your trunk. We won’t go through any papers. We barely even know how to read. We just want to see what else you might have there.”

I nod and search for the button that opens the trunk. My inexperience with cars no doubt strikes them as a suspicious reluctance to comply with their orders. Finally I find the button and I hear the gentle pop behind me. The fat cop checks the trunk, and the cop on my left returns to his car to type my information into his computer.

I carefully open the glove box and take out my gun while the trunk lid is blocking their view. I slide it under the jacket, which I nudge closer to myself, hoping they won’t notice.

I’ve read through the papers in my trunk; they’re incomprehensible gibberish. If whatever the Logistics people printed out for me is indeed representative of contemp defense contractors’ reports, then no wonder everything fell apart so fast.

The fat cop closes the trunk and returns to his previous position on my right. After another minute, the second officer rejoins us, handing me a pink slip of paper and explaining the citation. They’re not hags, just bored contemp cops wishing they’d stumbled onto a plot and settling now for their minor roles in this city’s busy narrative.

“Be more careful when driving in the city, Mr. Jones. Now, what was that address you were looking for?”

I repeat the address I’d given him before, passing his test, and he gives me directions. They bid me good night and return to their car.

I follow the directions to the meaningless address, well aware that they’re following me. After a few turns, there it is, a glass-and-steel apartment tower. I find a spot to park in—parallel parking an automobile is not one of my greatest skills, but performing under pressure is—and the cops wait behind me as I muscle into the space. Then they drive on.

I walk down 16th Street, which was where the GeneScan seemed to be leading me before it flickered off. This is a busier road, cars passing on either side, late-working lawyers and lobbyists and propagandists rushing home to their television and children and insulation.

Before me is a large, redbrick church. This seems a fitting reconnaissance point for hags, many of whom are religious, driven by unyielding devotion to their dangerous creeds. One would think they’d be happy just to be in a time like this, to be surrounded by so many churches and synagogues and mosques, to walk into a bookstore and see their beloved tomes for sale.

A sign in the tiny front lot tells me it’s a Catholic church. According to the schedule of services, nothing should be happening this late.

I feel an illicit thrill as I approach the sacred building. A cross hangs over the entrance, and at my side are whitened sculptures already in disrepair—a digit missing here, a streak of dirt there—as if they know their era is on the wane. The heavy door is unlocked. I step inside and gaze at the rows of dark pews, the gray tile floor, the stained-glass windows looming above the bare altar. It’s so quiet my breath almost echoes. Toward the front I see the backs of two gray heads, hair pinned up in buns. I try to imagine what these women are thinking as they kneel here, as they make themselves small before some being of their imagination, something that has taken on such power through shared belief.