The Time Traveler's Almanac (147 page)

“A message from Karina?” one of the officers at the bar asked. “She only saw him two days ago, why would she have a message?”

“That Daryn,” one of the officers said, shaking his head. “I wonder how he keeps them all straight?”

She had been in no mind to listen. She went back and threw his clothes out of her apartment, scattered his books and papers and simulation disks down the corridor with a savage glee. Then she bolted the door and refused to listen to his pounding or shouted apologies. Later, she heard, he had shipped out on the
Hesperia,
and she had felt glad that he was gone.

*   *   *

She was still cleaning the bar when the owner Patryos came in. “You going to be okay?” he asked.

It was the same thing Tayo had asked. Cheena nodded, without saying anything.

“I heard that the names are being listed,” Patryos said, “up in maintenance.”

She turned her head a little toward him, enough to show she was listening.

“You want to go up? I expect the first hour after the sailors start coming in will still be pretty calm.” He shrugged. “I can spare you for a little, if you want to go up.”

She didn’t look up, just shook her head.

“Go!” he told her, and she looked up at him in surprise. “Anybody can see you haven’t been worth anything, and you won’t be worth anything until you know for certain. One way or the other.”

He lowered his voice, and said, more calmly, “One way or the other, it’s better to know. Take it from me. Go.”

Cheena nodded, dropped her rag on the bar, and left.

She knew where to go in the maintenance quarter, although she had never had any reason to go there. Everybody knew. Behind the door was a desk, and behind the desk a door. Sitting at the desk was a single maintenance man. She came up to him, and said quietly, “Daryn Bey.”

His eyes flickered. “Relationship?”

“I’m his downspin wife.” It was a marriage that was only recognized within the boundaries of the port, but a fully legal one. The maintenance man looked away for a moment, and then said, “I’m sorry.” He paused for a moment, and then asked, “would you like to see him?”

She nodded, and the maintenance man gestured toward the door behind him.

The room was cold. Death is cold, she thought. She was alone, and wondered what to do. A second maintenance man appeared through another door, and gestured to her to follow. This close to spin axis, gravity was light, and he moved in an eerie, slow-motion bounce. She almost floated behind him, her feet nearly useless. She wasn’t used to low gravity.

He stopped at a pilot’s chair. No, Daryn wasn’t a pilot, she thought, this is the wrong man, and then she saw him.

The maintenance man withdrew, and she stared into Daryn’s face.

Vacuum hematoma had been hard on him, and he looked like he had been beaten by a band of thugs. His eyes were closed. The tattoos still glowed, faintly, and that was the worst thing of all, that his tattoos still were alive, and Daryn wasn’t.

She reached out and put her fingertips against his cheek with a feather’s touch, stroking along his jawline with a single finger. Suddenly, irrationally, she was angry at him. She wanted to tell him how inconsiderate he was, how selfish and idiotic and, and, and – but he was not listening. He was never going to listen.

The anger helped her to keep from crying.

*   *   *

By the time she returned to the Subtle Tiger, knots of sailors were walking upspin and downspin the corridors, talking and sometimes singing, dropping into a bar for a moment to see if it felt like a place to spend the rest of the shift, and then moving on, or staying for a drink. She passed a ferret crew going upspin toward the docks. The ferrets, slender and lithe as snakes with legs, squirmed in their cages, nearly insane with excitement over the prospect of being set free on the just-docked ship to hunt for stowaway rats.

She took over the bar from Patryos, serving drinks in a daze, unable to think of any quick responses to the double entendres and light-hearted suggestions offered by the sailors. Most of them knew that she had a sailor husband, though, and didn’t press her very hard, and of course they wouldn’t know that he had been in the wreck.

In fact, none of them would even know about the wreck yet; unless they had transferred across through an uptime wormhole, it was still in their future, and the port workers would be careful not to say anything that would cause a catastrophe. An incipient contradiction due to a loop in history would close the wormhole. A little information can leak from the future into the past, but history must be consistent. If enough information leaks downtime to threaten an inconsistency, the offending wormhole connection can snap.

The port circled the wormhole cluster, light-years from any star. If their passage to the rest of civilization by the wormhole connection failed, it would be a thousand years of slower-than-light travel to reach the fringes of civilization. So the port crew did not need to be reminded to avoid incipient contradiction; it was as natural to them as manufacturing oxygen.

Slowly the banter and the routine of serving elevated Cheena’s mood. One of the sailors asked to buy her a drink, and she accepted it and drank philosophically. It was hard to stay gloomy when liquor and florins were flowing so freely. She had kicked him out, after all; he was nothing to her. She could replace him any night from any of a dozen eager suitors – maybe even this one, if he was as nice as he seemed.

And the bar was suddenly especially hectic, with a dozen sailors asking for drinks at once, and half of them asking for more than that, and two more singing a rather clever duet she hadn’t heard before, a song about a navigator who kept a pet mouse in the front of his pants, with the heavyset sailor singing the mouse’s part in a squeaky falsetto. She was busy smiling and serving and taking orders, so it wasn’t surprising at all that she didn’t see him come in. He was quiet, after all, and took a seat at the bar and waited for her to come to him.

Daryn.

She was so surprised that she started to drop the beer she was holding, and caught it with a jerk, spilling a great splash of it across the bar and half across two sailors. The one she’d caught full-on jumped up, staring down at his splattered uniform. The one sitting with him started to laugh. “Now you’ve had your baptism in beer, and the night is still young, say now,” he said. After a moment the one who had been splashed started to laugh as well. “A good sign, then, wouldn’t you say?”

“Sorry, there,” she said, bringing them both fresh drinks, waving her hand when they started to pay. “The last one was on you, so this one’s on the house,” she told them, and they both laughed. All the time she carefully avoided looking toward Daryn.

Daryn.

He sat at the end of the bar, drinking the beer that the other barmaid had brought him, not gesturing for her to come over, but smugly aware that, sooner or later, she would. He said something that made the other barmaid giggle, and she wondered what it might have been. She served a few of the other sailors, and then, knowing that sooner or later she would, she went to talk to him.

“Alive, alive,” she said. It was barely more than a whisper.

“Myself, in the flesh,” Daryn said. He smiled his huge, goonish smile. “Surprised to see me, yes?”

“How can you be here?” she said. “I thought you were on – on that ship.”

“
Hesperia?
Yeah. But we docked alongside
Lictor
at Tarrytown port, and
Lictor
was short a navigator, and
Hesperia
could spare me for a bit, and I knew that
Lictor
was heading to stop here, and I’d have a chance to see you, and—” he spread his hands. “I can’t stay.”

“You can’t stay,” she repeated.

“No, I have to sail with
Lictor,
so I can catch up with
Hesperia
at Dulcinea.” He looked up at her. She was still standing stupidly there over him. “But I had to see you.”

“You had to see me,” she repeated slowly, as if trying to understand.

“I had to tell you,” he said. “You have to know that you’re the only one.”

You are such a sweet liar, she thought, how can I trust you? But his smile brought back a thousand memories of time they had spent together, and it was like a sweet ache in her throat. “The only one,” she repeated, still completely unable to think of any words of her own to say.

“You aren’t still angry, are you?” he said. “Please, tell me you’re not still angry. You know that you’ve always been the only one.”

*   *   *

Morning came to the second-shift, and she propped her head up on one elbow to look across the bed at him. The glow of his tattoos cast a mottled pattern of soft light against the walls and ceiling.

Daryn awoke, rolled over, and looked at her. He smiled, a radiant smile, with his eyes still smoky with sleep, and leaned forward to kiss her. “There will be no other,” he said. “This time I promise.”

She kissed him, her eyes closed, knowing it would be the last kiss they would ever have.

“I know,” she said.

3 RMS, GOOD VIEW

Karen Haber

Karen Haber is an American writer who has published nine novels, including
Star Trek Voyager: Bless the Beasts.
She is also the coauthor of
The Science of the X-Men
and an art critic and historian. Her short fiction has been published in
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
and many others. This story was first published in
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
in 1990.

“Apartment for rent,” said the net ad. “3 rms, gd view. Potrero Hill area, $1200 a month, utilities pd.”

It sounded like a dream. Every San Francisco apartment I had seen in the last six months had waiting lists for their waiting lists.

“Southern exp. Pets OK.”

Better and better.

Then I found the catch. The apartment was available, all right. In 1968.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not one of those with a temporal bias. And God knows, I’ve always wanted to live in San Francisco.

I first came north in ’07 on a family expedition to the Retro-Pan-Pacific Exposition. The fair was fun, but what I loved even better was San Francisco: the sunswept hillsides, the streets lined with bright flower boxes, the digitalized ding-a-ling of the streetcar bells floating in the cool air, the fog creeping in at dusk. Heaven, especially after thirteen summers spent baking in the San Fernando Valley. I vowed to come back.

It took me seventeen years and a divorce, but I did it. Right after I graduated from Boalt and passed the bar.

Unfortunately, housing was tight – in fact, strangulated. The city had instituted severe building restrictions back in ’03 and got what it asked for: all residential construction not only stopped but vanished, gone eastward to the greener pastures of Contra Costa County.

I got on the waiting list of every real estate agent in the Bay Area, but the best digs I would find was a studio apartment – more like a large walk-in closet with plumbing – in a renovated duplex in Yuba City. Add on a three-hour commute to my job in San Francisco’s financial district, and we’re not exactly talking about positive quality of life.

So when I saw the net ad, I jumped. And stopped in midair. As I said, I have no temporal biases. But I’m not one of those sentimental history nuts just dying to travel back to the Crucifixion, either. I like real time just fine, thank you. Always have. It’s a peculiar trait, considering my family.

My grandmother lives in 1962, and has for the last ten years. She said it was the last time that America believed in itself as a country. And it’s safe. She likes the peace and quiet of the pre-computer era. “Loosen up, Chrissy,” she said to me before she left. “You should be more flexible. There’s nothing wrong with living in the past.”

My brother lives in 1997 where he’s pierced his nose, lip, eyebrows, and had his scalp tattooed in concentric circles of red and black. Every now and then I get a note from him through e-mail: “Come visit. We’ll hit the clubs. Don’t you ever take a vacation? I thought girls wanted to have fun.”

As for Mom, well, she likes 1984. But then, she always did have an odd sense of humor.

Pardon me if I like realtime best. I’ve always had my feet planted firmly in the present. Practical, sturdy Christine. In the lofty hierarchy of Mount Olympus, I’d be placed just to the left of Zeus in the marble frieze, in the Athena position. Yes, I even have the gray eyes and brown hair to go with the no-nonsense attitude. I’m tall and muscular, as befits your basic warrior goddess/business attorney type. My stature is useful, too – who wants a lawyer who doesn’t look intimidating?

And I’ve never wanted to go backward. We all remember the first reports of time-travel glitches. Shari, one of my prelaw classmates at Berkeley, wanted to spend her Christmas break in the village where her French great-great-great-grandmother lived. But a power surge from Sacramento sent her to the fourteenth century instead. Talk about your bad neighborhoods. If she hadn’t gotten her shots before she left – complaining all the way – she’d probably have come back sporting buboes the size and color of rotten nectarines.

After Shari’s brush with the Black Death, I told myself I was immune to the allure of era-hopping. I ignored the net ads for Grand Tours: the Crucifixion and sack of Rome package, $1,598. Dark Ages through the Enlightenment, two weeks for $2,100, all meals and tips included. (These packages are especially popular with the Japanese, who have become time-travel junkies. And why not? They can go away and come back without losing any realtime at work.)

Even when the Koreans made portable transport units for home or office, I shrugged and stuck by realtime. But when I saw the listing in the paper, I looked around the stucco walls of my apartment/cell and threw all my sturdy, practical notions to the wind. An apartment on Potrero Hill? In a nanosecond, Pallas Athena transmuted into impulsive Mercury.

*   *   *

My hands trembled with excitement and impatience as I sent my credit history to Jerry Raskin, the real estate agent listed on the ad. Almost immediately I received an appointment to view the apartment. This Raskin sure didn’t waste any time.