The Time Traveler's Almanac (144 page)

And outside the oval ports, innocent and terrible, the field of space and timelessness hung on the rim of the vignette, a starless winter night.

*   *   *

The Rouelle Etoile was almost deserted, that twenty. There was some big action out at zero 98, and the ships had lifted off like vultures, to join in or to scavenge. The tall marble clock against the wall said nineteen fifteen, but the blue pianist was still rolling the tide of his hands up and down the keys. About four or five customers were sitting around chewing trouble, or playing Shot over on the indigo baize. And in one of the corner booths was Day Curtis.
Napoleon
was in dock, had come in two twenties before with a hole in her flank, and the crew were going all out to patch her over well enough to take her out into 98 and see what was left worth mopping up. But it didn’t look as if the repairs were going to make it in time, and at eighteen hundred Curtis had walked into the Rouelle with a look like dead lightning in the backs of his eyes. Curtis seldom showed when he was angry, but he could drink like dry sand, and that’s what he was doing, steadily and coldly draining the soul out of the bar, when the woman came in.

She looked late twenties, with hair black as the blackest thing you ever saw, which might be space, or an afterimage of some sun, cropped short across the crown, but growing out into one long free-slung black comma across her neck and shoulders. She had the spacer’s tawny paleness otherwise, and one of the poured dresses that went with the Rouelle, almost the same color as she was. She was off one of the ships that had stayed in dock, an artisan’s shuttle that had no quarrel with anyone in particular, but she walked in as if she’d come on a dare, ready to fight, or to run. She went straight to the bar counter and ordered one of the specialty cocktails, which she drank straight down, not looking at anyone or anything. Then she ordered another, and holding it poised in the long stems of her fingers, she turned and confronted the room. She moved like a dancer, and she had the unique magic which comes with a beauty that surpasses its name, a glamour that doesn’t fit in any niche or under any label. Four or five of the men in the bar were staring at her, but her gaze passed on over them with a raking indifference. She was obviously searching for something and, the impression was, hoping not to find it. Then her eyes reached the corner booth, and Curtis.

It’s possible he may have noticed her when she came in, or he may not. But implacable scrutiny, even in a truce zone, is frequently the prologue to trouble. After a second or so, he lifted his head slowly, and looked back at her. Her face didn’t change, but the glass dropped through her fingers and smashed on the polished floor.

For about a quarter of a minute she kept still, but there was a sort of electricity playing all around her, the invisible kind a wire exudes when there’s a storm working up in the stratosphere. Then, she kicked the broken glass lightly out of her way, and she walked very fast and direct, over to Curtis’ table. He’d kept on watching her, they all had, even the Sirtian pianist, though his hands never missed the up and down flow of the piano keys. The woman had the appearance of being capable of anything, up to and including the slinging of a fine-honed stiletto right across the bar into Curtis’ throat. Only a blind man would have ignored her. Maybe not even a blind man.

When she reached the table, the slim hand that had let go the glass flared out like a cobra and slashed Curtis across the face.

“Well,” she said, “you win the bet. What am I supposed to pay you?”

He’d had these one-sided scenes with women before, and supposedly assumed this was only another, one more girl he had forgotten. He said to her, matter-of-factly, “I’m sure you can find your own way out of here.”

“Yes,” she said, “I remember now. You warned me. Last time.”

“I probably warned you you were a fool, too. Either get out of the bar, or I will.”

“Fifteen years is a long time,” she said. Her eyes were like scorched freckled topaz, and there were white flowers enameled on her crimson nails. “I presume I’ve changed. Even if you haven’t. Oh, but I don’t expect you to recollect me. How could you? I just wanted to see, to understand—”

Curtis got up. He was moving by her when she caught at his arms. Her face was stark with the genuine terror the anger had been all along, and she said flatly, “Suddenly I’ve worked it out. I do understand. I’ve been afraid for years, and now I know why. You’re dead, Curtis. Or you will be. Tomorrow – soon—”

She’d started to retreat from him even while she said it, in a dazed, bewildered glide, but of course now he reached out and caught her back. A threat was a threat, and even a woman off an artisan’s vessel could be in Confederation pay.

“All right,” he said, holding her pinned. I’m interested. Tell me more about my death.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Please let go.”

“I let go when I hear what you have to say. Perhaps.”

“I don’t, after all, have anything to say.”

“What a shame. Let me prompt you. You’re dead, Curtis. Or you will be.”

“We all could be,” she said with an attempt at somber lightness. ‘There’s a war going on out there.”

“There’s a war going on in here,” he said. “You just started it.”

“You’re hurting me.”

“Not yet.”

She went on looking at him and he went on holding her. The room was full of piano currents and utter listening silence.

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “Let me sit down, and I’ll tell you.”

He nodded, and she slid into the booth, but he kept a grip on her wrist. They sat facing each other, almost holding hands, almost like lovers, ignoring the rest of the room, and he said to her gently, “In case you forget this is a truce zone, you’d better bear it in mind I can break your wrist in two seconds flat.”

She smiled dismally.

“I believe you would.”

“What’s more important, I believe it.”

She looked at the tabletop between them.

‘This is going to be difficult.”

“Only for you.”

She said bitterly, “You know, you’re almost funny.”

“The word ‘funeral’,” he said, “also begins with the word ‘fun’. Think about it.”

“All right.” Her eyelids tensed like two pale golden wings pasted across her eyes. Then her face smoothed out, relaxed, lost every trace of character. She might have been a doll, and her voice might have been a tape. ‘When I was sixteen, around half my lifetime ago, I was here in Tempi. I was traveling in my grandfather’s ship, the
Hawk,
before the war really hotted up. We’d come from Sirtis and we were heading for Syracuse. The ship was just a little cargo runner, completely legitimate and authorized up to the hilt. He wasn’t expecting any trouble – the cargo was safe and dull – and he’d brought me along to get me out of military school for a few months. I was so glad to be away, glad to be playing female and adult, and not just guns. He brought me in here, and gave me my first sunburst in a tall narrow glass. About seventeen hundred all the Alert panels started going off. An unscheduled lifeboat had blown into the Parameter. The markings were scalded off, and when they got the casings open, there was only one man in it. There was quite a squall then, because the name of the vessel he claimed to have come from wasn’t down on any of the listings. Besides, he was talking about a tempest out on zero 98, a time gale that cost him his ship, and there was no gale registering anywhere. Even so, he kept insisting there must be other survivors to be pulled in, but no one came, and when they used the sonar to scan, they picked up nothing, just as they weren’t picking up the gale. They questioned the man from the lifeboat until about nineteen hundred, and then they let him come into the Rouelle Etoile, with an official escort. He went over to the bar counter, and then he turned and looked right round the room. There was quite a crowd. My granddaddy was playing Shot over on the baize, and I was sitting exactly where you are now, in my grown-up frock, with one of the young helmsmen off the
Hawk.
The man who’d come in out of space looked at everyone until he got to me. Then he walked across. He dragged me to my feet and held me by my shoulders, and he swore at me. Jove, my helmsman, landed out at him, and the stranger thunked poor Jove across the head. Granddaddy came running with the official escort, and there was something of a fight. When somebody finally laid the stranger out with one of those chunk ashtrays from the bar, I took stock of my feelings. I was scared, horrified, and very flattered. It was all crazy. But I looked at the crazy stranger on the floor, with blood running through his hair, and he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, and, for whatever reason, I was the one he’d singled out. Quite logically, though I didn’t know it at the time, I fell in love with him. And it was you, Day Curtis.” She raised her eyes again, and gazed at him again. “You. Exactly as you are now. And I was sixteen.”

There was a pause. Curtis appeared bored, and simultaneously very dangerous. When she didn’t continue, he said, “If I let you go on, I imagine you’ll eventually reveal why you’re giving me this time cliché myth.”

“The nature of time,” she said, as coldly as he. “What do we really know about it? Two thousand streams, and us playing about in them like salmon.”

“The kind of time paradox you’re doling out is the sort of junk a Parameter is there to invalidate. Assuming it could even happen. You should change your brand of dream pills.”

“All right, mister,” she said. “Do I go on, or do I get out?”

He sat and studied her. He said, “You can tell it to the end.”

“Thank you,” she said icily.

“It’ll be interesting, seeing you hit the rotten wood and fall right through it.”

“Damn you,” she said.

“It takes more than you to do that.”

She stared at the tabletop again. She said, “They put you – it
was
you, Curtis – in the Medical Center on the Second Level. Guess what I did?” She glanced at him, and away. “I was sixteen, and I was in love. I went to your room. You were sitting staring out of the port at that blind-black Parameter sky, and your eyes looked just as black … though they’re not black at all, are they? Never mind. You said, ‘What the hell do you want?’ Wasn’t that a tender greeting? I didn’t know what to do, whether to fight you or surrender, or go away, or stay. I stayed. I stayed, Curtis. And gradually you started to tell me. About the time storm, about the number of the Cycle – fifteen years on from where it really was. You told me how I’d be when I was thirty-one, and how I’d walk into the Rouelle in the last hours of this twenty, and I’d see you, and drop my glass on the floor … I had to come in here tonight, to act it out. I didn’t think you’d be here. No. I did think you would. But if you were, it had to be some joke. You’d be in your forties. You’d laugh at me. But you’re not in your forties, and, my God, you’re not laughing. You’re just the way you told me, warned me, you’d be, that night I was sixteen and you told me not to come to Tempi ever again. But I had to. You can see that. Anyway, my ship came through Tempi, I didn’t have any choice this time. I could hardly have avoided it.”

She stopped, and detached one of the long white cigarettes from the dispenser. She drew on it and the ignition crystal broke, and the end glowed a pale, dull rose. The smoke made a design round her words as she said, “Tomorrow you take your ship out and you meet the storm. Your ship dies out there in the Warp Lanes. So do you. It’s just some part of you that’s left wandering there, lost, unaligned. And somehow, I draw you back, to the wrong Cycle, the wrong time, back to that night I was sixteen and I sat here in the Rouelle Etoile. I said, some part of you. Much more than that. You. It had to be because—” She faltered remotely, as if reading from a board abruptly obscured. Then: “I made you come back out of nowhere, and you hated me for it. It was the first intense emotion you’d ever felt for any human being. I think you wanted to kill me more than anything. And I think I’d have let you kill me. My own first really intense emotion, too.”

“So,” he said, “you got laid to the sound of discordant violins.”

She smiled tightly. “You should know. Unfortunately, you can’t. It’s my past, your future.”

“There are two alternatives,” he said. “Either you’re insane, or someone paid you to spook me about the next flight I take. Which is it?”

“No one paid me.”

“Which means you were paid. I hope you kept the money. You may need it for medical expenses.”

“Even if you kill me tonight, which you don’t, I’d still be waiting for you, in my yesterday. Tomorrow you’ll come out of space, and I’ll be there.” She finished the cigarette, and let it die in the glass ashtray. “I don’t think,” she said, “you had any right to come back out of death and time and space and haunt me, and ruin my life. I don’t think you have any right to be here, in my future, and ruin it again. I shouldn’t have tried to find you. But how could I resist?”

Curtis was no longer touching her, just his eyes, fixed on her, long lids blinking now and then, that was all. The rest of the room hadn’t been able to hear their conversation once it was trapped inside the booth, a low, coldly impassioned murmur of two voices, but mostly her voice, saying what she claimed to be the truth to him, as if it were a poem, the monologue from some play. So the room cast a look at them now and then, but nothing else. The two Shot players had even finished up and left the bar. And the pianist kept the dark blue tides coming and going on the piano keys, and the chandelier snowed its lights.

“I don’t want you to die,” she said finally.

“I can make you deliriously happy then,” he said, “because I don’t intend to.”

“I wish,” she said, “I could show you the proof of what happened. If I could prove it to you – if I could convince you – But I was sixteen, and the proof got lost, snatched and swept away, like everything else.” She met his eyes again, for a long, long time, and then she said, “I don’t think you have a soul anyway. Not this Cycle. I gave you a soul. It grew inside you, like the hate you felt for me, unless it wasn’t hate at all. And in the end, it looked back at me out of your eyes. But your eyes tonight are like the flat disks of sunglasses.”