Susan Squires - [Da Vinci Time Travel] (27 page)

“I hope I wasn’t too . . . uh . . . rough last night.”

She shook her head, embarrassed. It had been she who egged him on.

“I . . . I thought maybe we could go out to breakfast this morning. I know a little place that does great dim sum down in Chinatown.” He swallowed. “You like dim sum?”

“Love it.” Her mouth watered at the thought of the little Chinese tidbits that were brought round on steaming carts through giant dining rooms filled with chattering Chinese. “I’m yours.”

That made his face contract somehow before he straightened out his features.
Oh, god. That sounded clingy!
But she couldn’t say,
I didn’t mean it like that,
without acknowledging the embarrassment, or . . . her thoughts got tangled and she realized she was clutching the covers to her breast just like this guy hadn’t seen everything she owned in some detail.

She was nothing short of grateful when he gently closed the door.

They stood at the corner of Grant and Pine, having parked the car in the multilayered parking structure a few blocks down under St. Mary’s Square Park. All the way here, Diana had had a terrible feeling of wrongness she couldn’t put her finger on. It only grew when they got out of the Mission District. Too many signs in Spanish. Everything looked seedier than she remembered. And now this. She looked up at Gawain, who was staring around in shock, too.

Chinatown was . . . missing.

No crowded streets of milling Chinese and tourists. No storefronts filled with antiques and ivory disappearing into dim interiors. No tacky T-shirt and souvenir shops with little hanging pagodas twirling in the breeze. No markets with boxes of long bean and lotus root on the sidewalk and ducks hanging by their necks in the windows. And no gilded dragons arching over Grant Street as it narrowed to one-way. The Dragon Gate was gone.

They glanced to the street signs simultaneously, as useless as that was. Grant and Pine. Grant thrust up the steep hill to where St. Mary’s Church stood. As they watched, a cable car rumbled by on California at the top of the hill. That hadn’t changed.

But everything else had.

The simple shops and markets had not a trace of Asia about them. She and Gawain could almost have been standing in the Mission District. Carnecerias. Stores selling brightly colored linens and striped serapes. Signs in Spanish. But . . . what was that? Cyrillic? They hurried up the hill toward California Street. In the restaurant at the corner people were eating what had to be borscht, it was so purple-red. She blinked as she saw onion domes
on several of the buildings up on the far corner. St. Mary’s comforting brick was still there. But . . . was that an equal-armed cross? St. Mary’s was now Eastern Orthodox. The scene was far seedier than the Mission District. People’s clothes were ragged. Beggars were everywhere. Some had ulcerated sores on their bodies.

Gawain stopped a man with blond hair wearing a denim jacket that had seen better days. “Excuse me, sir, what . . . what happened to Chinatown?”

“Aprende hablar la lengua, amigo,” the guy said, and brushed past. Spanish from a guy who looked like that? And he acted as if everyone should be speaking Spanish

Gawain turned to her, his brows drawn together, blinking rapidly. He turned into the stream of hurrying workers and picked a middle-aged lady, slightly pear shaped, but not Hispanic at all. “Pardoneme, senora. ¿Dónde está Chinatown?”

“Chinatown? Esa es loco. Nosotros hacemos la guerra con esos bastardos.” She hurried away, looking back fearfully over her shoulder, as though Diana and Gawain were traitors. They were getting stares from several other people as they hurried by.

“Come on,” Gawain said in a low voice as he took her arm and hurried her back to the car. When they were safely inside with the doors locked, he turned and looked at her. She could see in his eyes that he was thinking the same panicked thoughts that were careening around in her head. She didn’t want to voice them. But someone had to do it.

“Everything’s changed, isn’t it?”

“Well. People are speaking Spanish here as the primary language,” he said carefully, as if trying not to shout. “And there seems to be a strong Russian component. But no Chinatown. And we might be at war with China.”

“Maybe all of Asia. The Indian restaurant near the
apartment was missing last night,” she said in a hushed voice.

He took a huge breath. “Could . . . could sending Mordred back change things that much?”

“We sent him back to his death,” she protested. “Just like before when he died from that wound he got from Arthur . . .” She trailed off. Their eyes met.

“Except we sent him back all stitched up nicely and loaded with antibiotics.”

Diana had a hard time getting her breath. “Library. We need a library.”

Gawain’s gut was churning. He’d botched the mission again. He’d only saved Diana’s life by a hair, since he was too stupid to figure out that Mordred had been snatched away before he could sire her. But in the process he had changed the flow of history so dramatically. . . .

“Market and Larkin,” she said. “At the Civic Center. The City Library is the biggest.”

He was about to give the attendant a five when he remembered the
taqueria
last night. They hadn’t wanted his money and he had a dreadful feeling he knew why. But credit cards still worked for some reason. He was probably making charges to some account registered to a stranger. He pushed his card into the slot and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel impatiently until the gate arm slowly rose.
Patience,
he told himself, trying to breathe.
You screwed this up the first time by acting rashly. Better stop and think.
“How do we know this isn’t exactly the outcome my father wanted?” he asked, more of himself than Diana.

“That’s why we’re going to the library. Let’s see what actually happened.”

Gawain turned left on Post and gunned the Range Rover toward a right on Kearny. Now that he knew what
to look for, it was as plain as the nose on your face. Lots of Mission architecture that hadn’t been there yesterday. Adobe walls would have faired badly in the 1906 earthquake, but if they survived, they would have done better in the fire that followed.

“Look.” Diana pointed. Just off Market, where the Moscone Center used to be, there was a huge square populated with buildings that sported beautiful onion domes and bright colors.

Gawain gritted his teeth. All this change occurred just because one guy lived who should have died? They flew down Market until they got to the Civic Center. The library and the City Hall were Spanish-style hacienda buildings. Gone was the gold-leaf dome on the City Hall. And the controversial modern design of the library was a thing of the past, or
a
past that no longer existed. They parked in a garage that charged six bucks every twenty minutes. That hadn’t changed. They jumped out, hurried down the street, ran up the shallow steps, and pushed in through the glass door.

Diana whispered to him how the inside had changed. The library still had a beautiful skylight in the central atrium, but now the architecture that had engendered comparisons to a literary mall was gone. Bright murals on white walls seemed to be the theme. The bank of computer indexes was the same. Gawain mustered his Spanish and figured out that the history section was on the fourth floor. He dared not draw attention by asking. On the fourth floor, the titles of the books were all in Spanish and Russian. He didn’t even see any books on the history of England.

Diana scanned the shelves and then looked up at him, her gray-green eyes frightened. “Any book should do.”

He picked out a book called
Historia del Mundo Moderno
and took it over to a broad, Mission-style oak table
away from the older people reading newspapers and a woman buried in a book in the corner. Gawain splayed their history book open as Diana looked over his shoulder.

Okay. It was laid out by year. And it had maps. He flipped to the atlas part of the book. It fell open naturally to North America. That was the first shock. There was no section labeled “United States of America” or “Canada” or even “Mexico.” A huge swath of the center of North America in a shape a little like a crescent was labeled “New France.” What should have been Mexico, the Southwest, and California up to just north of San Francisco was called España Nuevo. San Francisco (still labeled with that name) was on the border now of a territory that included Oregon, Washington, western Canada, and Alaska. This was the same color as the Russian lands west of the Bering Strait, as were Japan and the Korean peninsula. It was all Russia. Only a narrow strip along the eastern seaboard down to about Virginia—what once had been called New England—was now called New Trevellyan and looked to have been settled by British people, though all the place names were Celt.

“My God,” Diana whispered, staring at the map.

Gawain was having a hard time getting his breath. He flipped to another page and found maps of Europe. What had been Britain was divided into three parts. The east and north were the same color as something called Scandia that took in all of Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, as well as Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys, and the north of Scotland and Ireland. The southwest of the island was called Saxony and was part of a country that incorporated everything that was German, Austrian, or Dutch on the Continent. The west of England and the south of Ireland were called Trevellyan. They were all crosshatched to indicate that they belonged to “Europa.”
France now encompassed all the lands to the south and northern Africa.

“He held the Celtish lands against the Saxons,” Gawain said as he scanned the map.

“He said he was the only one who could do it,” Diana said in a small voice.

“He was right. And that means there was no united England.” He flipped the map to other pages. No India and Pakistan. Along with China and the southeast Asian countries and Australia, the whole thing was just called Asia. Africa was a hotchpotch of microscopic countries with tribal names, except for the North African part of France. The Middle East was comprised of just two countries, called Shiia and Sunni.

“What does this mean?” Diana asked. “What happened?”

Gawain paged back to text. “If Saxons and Celts were separate, then Britain never united under Alfred the Great. I . . . I guess there was no British Empire. They could hold that tiny corner of America but were never a powerhouse to rival the French or the Spanish. Maybe they even lost to the Spanish Armada. . . .”

“I thought the British Empire was bad,” Diana whispered as he studied the text.

“Plus/minus. It dominated local cultures. But it also gave the rule of law, the industrial revolution, systems of education, freedom of religion. . . . It kept tribal rivalries under control until institutions of government could prevail and prevented some genocides. . . . It brought countries into the modern world.”

Diana went and collected newspapers from the front racks while he confirmed his theory in the history book. No trade of goods or ideas occurred between the powers. New Spain and Russia had been at war for nearly a century
with Asia, and it was taking a toll. There was some kind of agreement to keep the conflict contained to several border countries. Everyone had the bomb, and the ever-present threat that one party would use it weighed on people’s psyches. Budgets went to defense. No wonder San Francisco looked poor.

“So,” Diana was saying slowly. “Is it good or bad that things have changed?”

“Half the world at war with the other half is not good.”

“Is it so different from what we had before? Little corners of war all over the place.” She pursed her lips in thought as she handed him the newspapers. He scanned them while she thought. “Hard to know what to do.” She sighed.

“This doesn’t look like a great world to live in.” He pointed to an article. “Prisoners of war are tortured routinely. There’s a famine going on in big parts of the world.”

“Don’t get me started on torture. And we had famine before, too.”

“Yeah, in small corners of Africa. This is famine over more than half the world. My father couldn’t have wanted this.” He was starting to be surer of his course.

“As if we can do anything about it now. . . .”

She hadn’t thought about it enough. “I could go back and . . .” He looked around at the other patrons in the library and changed his wording. “Carry out my first intent.”

“Kill Mordred?” she whispered.

He nodded. “After he sires you.”

“I thought you never wanted to go back there.”

“I have to put things right, Diana. I’ve failed miserably. I’ve changed the world for the worse by sending him back. I
have
to put things right.” He could see Diana searching for some way around what had to happen here. Her gaze darted around the room.

Then she stilled, and took a deep breath. “You’re right. But I’m coming with you.”

He rolled his eyes. Let her endanger herself by coming back a second time to fifth-century England in the middle of a war? “Not happening.”

“It’s my fault, you know. You can say it’s your failure because you always take the blame for everything. But I was the one who brought him here. I took him to the hospital and filled the prescription for antibiotics. And I powered up the machine and sent him back. So I’m going.”

How could he make her understand? “If anything happens to you, my whole mission will have been for naught.”

Her lips got that determined set to them. “You need me to power the machine up.”

True. “You can show me. . . .”

“Nope. Nothing doing. I’m coming with you.” She rose from her chair, exuding purpose.

He couldn’t let her do that. He’d let her power up the machine. Then he’d take it back alone if he had to tie her up in a corner to do it. He’d be stuck back then and the machine would bounce back just like it had with Mordred.

He’d never see her again.

What would keep her from just using it herself after it returned to now?

So he’d have to damage it to keep it from bouncing back. He couldn’t let her endanger herself. She was important. His father said so. And it had been his mission to protect her. He might have botched things by sending Mordred back, but he had at least kept Diana safe. He wasn’t going to fail at that, too.