Escape Velocity: The Anthology (23 page)

      
I remember only too clearly my struggle to get his mortal remains into his travelling trunk. In the morning I feigned normality, telling the servants that George had departed already, and ordered his trunk sent on. I invented the address, and hoped it would be quite some time before anyone opened it. I packed whatever jewellery and money I could find in haste, and we came here, a normal-seeming journey. My first plan was to flee from here to Bavaria, where I might hope to earn my bread by teaching English. Alas, we should be conspicuous, and I fear the law must eventually discover us. For myself, I no longer care, but I took comfort that Julian might be somewhat older by the time I was hanged. My plan has changed. I have spent hours contriving an account of my troubles (but not my crime!) in Middle English, and I shall beg the time travellers to take me to the end of the millennium. The world should not have become unrecognisable in that time – men should scarcely be flying – but I shall escape. You would, I am sure, urge caution, and you would be right. What do I know of these strange folk beyond their own account? They are clearly not to be trusted to find the year 2,000 or any other. It grieves me to leave you alone. And yet what else am I to do? I pray that the strange woman in Lincoln was right, and that all will indeed turn out for the best. Certainly, I shall need courage, as she said. I shall leave this letter in my room. If you receive it, you will know that I could not return to destroy it, and therefore I have gone to the future. Please burn this missive. Good-bye forever, my heart.

Your loving sister,
Sophie.

14 Rue des anenomes,
Nates, France.
18th July, 1849.

My Dear Joanne,

How shall I begin to explain? I fear my last letter will have distressed you greatly. Although you will receive my letters only two days apart, a score of years has passed for me. But I am well, and I am now forty-eight years old. If you believe I should pay for my crime, I will understand, but I misdoubt that you will find any to believe your tale.

      
You will have gathered from receiving it that the time travellers did indeed agree to convey us, but not to the destination I anticipated, nor in the manner.

      
Naturally my Middle English greatly improved with constant use. I shall tell you the whole as I finally understood it, and leave out the many misunderstandings & misconceptions under which I long laboured.

      
Mica and Zondliss are historians, attempting to research witchcraft. They had a companion, Bordan, who sadly succumbed to the Black Death. I think Bordan must have been the practical member of the crew. Zondliss is pleasant natured & hopelessly incompetent. Mica is sweetness itself and utterly impractical - which accounts for their unplanned detour to 1849. Do you remember Mr. Cartlight who knew everything about Babylon but could never open his own boiled egg without assistance, nor find his handkerchief, nor his spectacles? Mica is cut from the same cloth. They have a wondrous device aboard their time carriage which produces food from wood shavings. This had a cord ending in a curious six-pronged contrivance. Beside it on the wall was a curious six-hollowed depression. I fitted the prongs into the hollows and the contraption immediately began producing roast beef with potatoes & carrots. Since nobody dared to adjust it, we continued with roast beef until Julian indulged his curiosity while none of us observed him, whereupon every meal became poached salmon with spinach. You may not credit it, but one can tire of such luxury, especially for breakfast.

      
Zondliss endeavoured to bring us to the year he & Mica left, with remarkable incompetence. I was sent to inquire into the date on a number of occasions. You may imagine the reaction I obtained by approaching utter strangers in what they considered Carnival dress, and inquiring, please what year was this? Consequently I once spent a whole shilling on a newspaper to discover the year was 1970. I still preserve the newspaper and it delights me. Flying machines & horseless carriages & men walking on the moon! Truly Joanne, the moon! And yet perhaps more wonderful to me was the situation of women: divorcing husbands, debating in Parliament and campaigning for equal pay with men. I seriously considered staying, but I could scarcely repay Mica & Zondliss with abandonment.

      
At length we arrived in the far future where everyone looked like Mica & Zondliss. I was confounded to discover that we were still one thousand years from Mica's time, but then she obtained a competent coachman, and thus we reached her home year.

      
I declare my entire sojourn was one long perplexity & bewilderment. I was sorely puzzled to distinguish one future-dweller from another, and they arrived with a “pop” from thin air and departed the same way. It gave me palpitations every time, although Julian chuckled with glee. We visited cities floating in the air, and an utterly vast hollow sphere around a sun. I cannot begin to make you understand the strangeness of it all, for I could not begin to understand it myself.

      
It was obvious that we could not live in such a time. Even had I learned to fit in, where would Julian find a wife? And yet, if we were returned to 1849 I should be hanged, and then what would become of Julian? Finally the notion occurred to me to return to before George's murder, when there should be no hue & cry. Accordingly I told them I came from 1829, and to 1829 they returned me. I pawned my jewels, and obtained a position as governess to a French family who originally came to Otley to escape Bonaparte. You do not need me to tell you of the trials of a governess' life, being only too familiar with them yourself. The family regarded me as a servant, and the servants regarded me as a spy for the family.

      
And then the master's younger brother visited. Truly Joanne, I did not set out to ensnare him. Having married once under the influence of Mammon, I should scarcely rush to repeat the experiment! I merely thought (and still think) Francois to be the most kind & charming & agreeable man I had ever met. It seemed extraordinary to me that he was unwed, notwithstanding his shyness. When at last I confided to him some of the truth of my first marriage, he declared that God gave men muscles to protect their families, and not to bully them. On another occasion he opined that a woman's talents were no less than a man's, merely distinct. Men have muscles while women have clever, sensitive fingers; men are able to concentrate on one thing with great energy, while a woman can attend to many things at once. Thus man & woman were complete when together. That is how he makes me feel, Joanne, complete.

      
And so I became Madame Verne, at the cost of no small scandal, and we are still happy and complete together. We had another four children and all are well. At Francois' suggestion, we changed Julian's name to the French equivalent, Jules, to save him from cruel comments when he should begin his schooling.

      
I wrote my younger self a letter, warning against marriage to George, but I forbore to post it. If I never married George, what should become of Jules? Would he cease to exist? I could not bear to venture such a circumstance. I shudder to think what paradoxes I may have caused by my untruths already. Yet I have just returned from Lincoln where I talked to my younger self as I entered the coach. I remembered how the words gave a glimmer of hope in my darkest days, and I could not forbear.

      
Jules, of course, has no memory of his natural father, nor of our extraordinary adventures. How could he, at those tender years? And yet he writes the most extraordinary novels of the future.

Your loving sister,

Sophie.

An Empty Kind of Love

Adam Colston

K9-12L5-R examined her naked body carefully in the mirror. There was nothing obviously wrong; the full visual scan had turned up no problems. The complexity of her outer Tru-Skin layer was unmarked and undamaged. All the skin nano-matics were fully functional and it was, according to her internal sensor, being kept at the perfect human body temperature.

      
She was confused. She stepped closer to the mirror. A high magnification scan showed no damage to her face. Her microfiber irises functioned perfectly when pulsed. She batted her eyelids slowly.

       “
Honey,” she pouted to her reflection, “why don’t we fool around?” She followed it up with a flash of teeth and her most vivacious smile. Her internal diagnostics monitored the performance closely. They instantly confirmed that her sexual allure was fully functional.

      
It’s a mystery
, she thought,
perhaps my diagnostic systems are faulty.

      
She turned towards the dark window and accessed the house net. The window depolarized and the sunlight poured through, illuminating eddies of dust that spun gently in the air. She watched the swirling vortices for a moment. Then she moved her hand gently through dust, causing it to spin and twist chaotically.

       “
Too complex,” she remarked at her failure to predict each of the millions of particles flight paths.

      
Getting dressed, she slipped on a small black dress and matching black heels.
Not too high
, she thought with a smile,
but just high enough
. She swept her hair back and tied it into a bunch, then put on the silver necklace he liked her to wear.

      
When she came into the living area, he was slouched on the white sofa, wrapped in a blue robe and eating some toast from a plate. His dark hair flopped over his face. He was totally absorbed in an ancient paperback book.
Runaround
was printed down the book’s spine together with the author’s name. She searched her catalogue but found no references to it. Leaning her head to one side, she watched him for a few minutes, quietly.

       “
Peter?”

       “
Yeah, doll?” He said, without looking up.

       “
I have to go into the city to have my diagnostics systems checked. Can we leave now?”

      
He looked up with a frown. “Anything wrong, Suki?”

       “
No, I just have to confirm all my systems are functional. It’s a routine test, Peter, but it’s still important.”

      
It had been Peter who had first called her Suki, before that she had been only K9-12L5-R. He had found the name in a book, and from then on she had been Suki. “Oh, okay. Sure. I’ll just finish my toast and then we can go.” He turned back to his book.

      
She stood perfectly still and watched him for the five minutes it took him to eat the single piece of toast; she stayed there while he showered, shaved and got dressed.

      
Forty minutes later when he re-appeared, she was still waiting.

       “
Shall we go then, babe? You ready?” he asked, lifting a single eyebrow.

       “
Yes, Peter.”

They cruised to the city in the lev-car. Suki watched him drive. He liked to drive; to be in control. The auto-guidance system, she knew, would take over if he miscalculated a turn.

      
They pulled up on Main Street and as they exited the car, the hot sun boiled down on them. Peter slipped on his sunglasses against the glare and ran his fingers through his hair. He  told the lev-car to park itself and it spun into the air with a loud crackle, disappearing in a cloud of dust.

      
Main Street consisted of two rows of hundred meter-long silver domes that ran along both sides of the road. From the air, it had looked like someone had spilled droplets of mercury across the land in two straight lines and then had drawn a road between. Ground-cars hurtled down the road at sub-sonic speeds.

      
They walked in the shimmering heat towards the nearest dome. After slipping through the mirror-field they entered a sheltered interior space. Gentle music played and a small waterfall to one side splashed gently into pool, upon which pink, flowering lilies floated. Further back were corridors and rooms with numbers on the doors. In front was a wooden desk, behind which stood a single silver robot, waiting. A plant with large ochre leaves climbed up a trellis to the foyer’s domed ceiling twenty meters above, by it were a few comfortable chairs spaced evenly around a small table.

       “
You do what you have to do, Suki,” Peter said with a quick smile. “I’m going to sit down here and read my book. Do you reckon you’ll be long?” He pulled the Asimov book out of his back pocket.

       “
No, Peter. I won’t be very long. It is only a routine diagnostics check.”

      
Suki stood still and watched him sit down on one of the soft chairs. He put his feet on the table, opened his book at a folded-over page and started to read.

      
When he was settled, Suki spun on her heels and walked across the polished stone floor to the reception desk.

       “
Welcome to Turingoid. Please insert your finger here,” the silver robot said, indicating a hole on the desk surface.

      
Suki slipped her finger in the hole; a small probe connected with her system briefly.

       “
Thank you. Your request has been processed. Please proceed to room 4c.”

      
When she arrived in 4c she was met by a male android.

       “
K9-12L5-R, what seems to be the problem?” the male android asked in a perfectly modulated voice.