The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (42 page)

Indexical derivability made all things inevitable. Once you had its fourteen definitions, seven axioms, and forty-one basic theorems, from then on if you could describe what you wanted to do, it was just a matter of doing the steps, deriving the equations (or proving that no equations could be derived, which was equivalent to absolute impossibility), and then solving them. Solving them was a bastard, of course. Newton worked all his life, without success, to unify relativity and quantum.

Then just under 200 years ago, Babbage saw how to use deoxyribonucleic acid to solve equations; after that, any Liejt sixteen-year-old, if his allowance would cover a few tubes of chemicals from the school supplies at Office Matt’s plus an ordinary amino-acid sequencer from the pet store, could unify quantum physics and relativity in about three days. You still needed the occasional genius to explain what the right question was – it wasn’t till Einstein that people really understood what time travel would mean or require – but once you could ask a question intelligently, it was only a matter of a few hours to learn whatever you wanted. As for building whatever you dreamed up, with such a variety of tech stuff out there, if you had a Liejt ID, you could probably get the parts from any junkyard or hobby store.

The universe still is what it is. Turns out questions like, “How can I love my neighbor?” are impossible to write in a soluble form, but “How can I make a really big bomb?” and “How can I go back and change the past?” are easy – just slap it together following the directions that come out of the tube and off you go.

Luckily by far the most common jumpers are the ones who are trying to cheat intemporia – the ones who jump back to give their earlier selves a bit of good advice or to take a different turn in the road. Too close to their departure point, there’s so little room for casopropagation that the most likely consequences are fatal accidents or little “Appointment in Samara” lessons (often both simultaneously). It doesn’t matter how often people hear that the universe is imperfectly reality-conservative, favoring whatever results in the least displacement, in Einstein’s famous formulation. All they hear is “imperfectly” and “favoring” – like the Serpent whispering Thou shalt not surely die.

The short-term jumpers, the ones who go back five or thirty years, all think the stochastic exceptions the universe makes will be made in their direction, and that they’ll be really happy if they just try to kiss Esther, or pop Bart in the nose when he shoves them in the hall, or buy Plum Computer when it’s cheap; and each short term jumper is always the only person surprised when it turns out that actually nothing much changes even if they live and we don’t catch them.

The exception to that was that Federal authorities could do a quick, simple edit, when someone crossed a boundary that must never be crossed. In such cases it worked because, honestly, if you changed people, you changed a lot of things, but if you just deleted them, generally you didn’t. Most of us don’t like to know how disposable we are, but there you have it. If us Feds didn’t like what people were doing now, we’d eliminate them at some time back in the past, and history would close around the little space they had taken up – not “as if they had never been” – but just plain, they had never been.

Only freak-memory social isolates like me and Horejsi would recall it. That was part of how the FBI found us. Say a Com’n boy developed a crush on his personal slave. You couldn’t punish him for that; he was higher. To punish and forbid meant admitting it was possible to cross the boundary. So you made it that it never had been crossed; a Federal agent took a short hop back and the slave girl had some quick, painless accident as a small girl, and the boy’s family was warned to find more appropriate slaves.

But if three weeks after she ceased to exist, the boy was asking about her, you knew you had someone who had that kind of memory; you could fix him by having him talk to a lot of people, but if he wouldn’t do that, he would be either an FBI agent, or someone who needed sequestering.

There were rumors that for some cases there were many, many people who needed elimination. I had met one older agent who had once told me of having had to eliminate four generations into the past to get rid of a Diana Spencer, but he didn’t say for what; I gathered it involved a Royal person, and noting that the old man telling the tale was drunk, stopped him before he said more. Shortly after that conversation, the man vanished, but perhaps he just died and I didn’t hear about it. I never asked around to see if anyone remembered him.

As for me, there was a sad, soft spot in my heart for LaNella, who I think was a Free nurse I must have preferred to my own mother (so many Liejt boys do – we’re too young to understand the consequences and after all we see the nurse for hours every day, and Mama for perhaps two hours on Sunday). If it wasn’t all a dream, then LaNella ceased to be while I was away at school for my first year, and when I came home at Christmas and asked for her, they took me to meet a nice man who promised I could be an FBI agent when I grew up.

So altering recent history was really nothing: the government did it all the time, whenever it was convenient. Private individuals tried it all the time, and either failed (because they didn’t have the government’s resources or simplicity of intention) or succeeded without changing much. It was illegal for private citizens, and they eliminated Free and Com’n people to prevent the violation’s ever happening, and the fine for Liejts doing it was outrageous. But though the penalties were harsh for short term jumps back in time, in truth there was little harm or difference made, whether we caught them or not.

There was also little harm from anyone jumping into deep history; if you leaped back and assassinated Alexander, there might be a wild divergence for as much as 200 years, but the immense, massive intemporia of the whole time stream would find its way back to its old bed, and if you went back to, say, the Younger Dryas, whatever you did would be utterly undone – paleobiological expeditions were common school projects.

But every now and then someone decided to change something in meso-history, which meant the causal delta hits its maximum near the present. Whenever that happened, the first time the Federal Bureau of Isotemporality knew anything, a couple of battles had reversed their outcomes, the linguistic lines between English, Fransche, Russky, and Espano in the Armoricas had moved hundreds of miles, the Untitled States of Armorica had gained or lost ten states, and there was a Yorkist on the Confederate throne again.

The physics could have turned out worse. If the rate of casopropagation were uniform, continuous, instantaneous, or forward-causality conservative – any one of them would have done it – then after each past-changing trip, we’d instantly be in that other world, millions or billions of us would cease to exist and be replaced by someone else, everyone’s new memory would conform to everyone else’s, and the world would go on without even a fart in time.

Fortunately for those of us who like to go on existing, Einstein showed that casopropagation is stochastic, discrete, metatemporal, and biased toward zero change but not strictly conservative.

Mesohistorical time travelers nearly always wanted to come back to somewhere around the time they left, and the changes they made were reversible until they did, so they found a living human to be their ballast body. If you used an inert ballast body, say a load of mud from a riverbank or a fallen log from a forest, the trackers would find it right there at the place where your time machine took off, and disconnect its causal relation to you (dispersing and destructuring it – blow it up, burn it, grind it up and scatter it). You’d just have pointlessly ceased to exist.

But if your temporal field reached into the past to grab a live person, then with luck, the ballast, arriving suddenly in the future, would wander off and become hard to locate, thus ensuring that the time traveler had somewhere to return to. (Every so often someone would grab a deer; this worked as long as you could count on the deer not to get caught, and didn’t mind arriving and returning somewhere unplanned in the woods.)

So Horejsi and I were supposed to find the ballast body during the interval between departure and return. Once we did, other agents would change the ballast in enough ways so that the time traveler’s forward isotemporal soundings couldn’t get a fix, they never came back, and the casopropagation was undone; Horejsi liked to call it the “no deposit, no return” system because that always made me have to cover my mouth and not let any hidden camera see me smile. I sometimes thought she must have some kind of death wish; of course it was fine for her to like me, but she must know how often she put herself in danger of being seen to be liked.

Anyway, finding ballasts was what we did. Once we did, regular agents moved in and did the simple grade-school science of altering the ballasts to break the connection. There are fifty or a hundred things you can do to ballasts once you find them. Some of them are even fairly humane.

“Want to try to ling him out?” I asked. “Dutch accent, odd behaviors, arrived naked with strange injuries – is that enough for a dictionary expansion into a Dodgsonian?”

“I think so,” she said. “System up for voice.”

“Up,” Wingtoes said.

Horejsi stared at the ceiling, took a deep breath, and set her Riemann eyes on opaque; I envied her that ability, though she said it couldn’t be all that different from just having eyelids. Maybe she didn’t really understand that total darkness is different from very dim red blur.

She held that deep breath, focused her tension, let the breath out, counted down slowly from ten to zero, and fell into a light, lucid trance with a soft sigh. “Dutch, Dutch Boy, Dutch Boy paints, Dutch Harbor, Dutch treat, Dutch chocolate, Amsterdam, Damn-damn-damn, Rotterdam, Hope they’ll Rotterdam teeth out, dikes, boy with finger in dike, middle school boy jokes, Richard the Second, Bolingbroke, gutter, alley, Prince Hal, Hal and his pal, Hal-canal, windmills, Chaucer, Wife of Bath, need a bath, bride of Frankenstein needs a bath, mad scientist, Frank the Mad Scientist, Frank Francis Francis Tyrwhitt, Tyrwhitt To-Who a Merry Note . . .”

Her light, flat, fast-talking monotone went on, interrupted periodically by deep, slow breaths. I watched the projected image on the wall; each word or expression popped onto the screen in pale green, and a swarm of blue points – closely related words – would accrete around it like instant fungus, putting off orange shoots of exact antonyms, red coils of strangely-attracted words, and gray filaments of etymological links. Structures accreted, stabilized, or cycled, and eventually homologies emerged in the data; the structures whirled, bounced, adhered, and merged, dragging their parent objects with them, until at last I put my hand up and said, very softly, “Wingtoes, that’s enough.”

The phrase Wingtoes that’s enough flickered in pale green for a moment, then disappeared, replaced by the single word
COMPLETE.

I felt Horejsi move, adjusting her Riemann eyes. She sat beside me, as always too close to be polite but not close enough to clearly signal she was offering herself for sex. I had thought about what I would do if she ever moved that close, and I was afraid that someone would notice that it was not merely a Liejt making use of a Com’n co-worker; what if I really liked her and someone saw?

“Four probable synecdoches,” I said, “and one almost-catachresis. I’ll take the catachresis around and see who gloms.”

“Want company?” she asked.

“That end of town is ganged up bad. I don’t think I want to be a person with a partner looking for info. Smells like cop and cops have accidents up there.”

Horejsi nodded; I was glad she didn’t insist on coming with me. Having her along for a physical brawl would only improve my odds by about 9 per cent, but having the Bug-Eye Lady (as my informants tended to call her) standing beside me would cut the chances of people telling me what they knew by about 22 per cent.

She hugged me; I hoped it looked subservient enough to any cameras there might be, but I suppose it always had before. “Be careful,” she said.

I pushed her away gently and said, “I always am,” and did my best to keep my face flat when she smiled. It was another joke no one else got.

Four motivations account for just a shade less than sixteen out of every seventeen mesohistorical jumpers (the next better approximation is 3151 out of 3349):

• obsession with a historical question (nowadays all the photos of Praesidant Reagan’s assassination have a dozen guys in costumes of the next three centuries standing around with cameras)
  

• compound interest schemes (we don’t think the Stock Bubble of 1641 even existed in Original History)
  

• I could-have-been-a-better conqueror fantasies (the Whenness Prophylaxis Program could probably have filled a high-rise apart ment block every decade with all the Hitlers and Napoleons who had to be isolated)
  

• serial killers (there’s a lot of history where they’re less likely to be caught).
  

Peron probably wasn’t any of those four. Horejsi thought she’d spotted two other categories in the residuals, and she thought Peron was what she was calling “Class Six.” If she was right, the situation was worse than it appeared. I didn’t have any way to quantify how much worse.

“I’m looking for a guy that is probably called Dutch Lop,” I said. “Usual kind of deal, you know I’m good for the benjamins.” I flashed her five 1500-dollar bills and Pickles smiled back at the smiling Disraeli. “He might also be called Dutch Einstein or Doctor Dutch, which he probably likes better than Dutch Lop.”

Pickles didn’t bathe as much as she needed to these days, but she still dressed to give you a view of what was for sale. I sat back away from her but she edged closer. I could see her lips move while she counted one-and-a-half, three, four-and-a-half . . . She’d’ve been happy with a tenth of what I was going to pay her – the seven and a half was just to make sure she remembered the conversation.

After a minute Pickles nodded. “New guy I’ve heard of but haven’t met. Missing an ear if I hear right.” She giggled, or at least shook while she brought up some phlegm. “Get it?” She must’ve thought that was funny. “He’s the cruncher for Brock’s Geiger bank. I’ve bet four eleven forty-four with them a couple times but it’s never come up, so I know it’s bogus.”