All the Colors of Time (10 page)

She didn’t think she was doing that; she made it a point,
when she was with Alec, to really be with Alec.

“You’re a great mom, Sharon,” Trevor said. “The best. And I
happen to know Alec thinks so, too.”

“Mind reading, Trev?” she chuckled. “You’re just full of
unexpected talents.”

“I’ve just known you a long time.”

True, she admitted as she gathered her goods into a shoulder
bag, the design of which had been ‘sniffed’ from the window of a sporting goods
store fifty years in the future. She had known Dr. Trevor Haley since her first
days on staff at QuestLabs in ’78 as a junior associate. She was fresh from
obtaining her Masters in History and her doctoral thesis was a biography of
Magda Oslovski, the primary mind and driving force behind Spectral Shift
Technology.

Sharon and Trevor had become instant pals. Robert joined
QuestLabs a year later and her reaction to him was instantaneous and profound.
Fortunately, her feelings were reciprocated; they had married and Alec had been
born a year later.

She had most often partnered with Trevor on her Shifts. Dr.
Oslovski, still QuestLabs grand-dame, had a standing rule about allowing
married couples with children Shift as a team. It was simply not done. Sharon
had thought the rule a nuisance at first; now she could only applaud its
wisdom.

At 1300 hours, she and Trevor were Shift-ready. Their
electrolytes and hydration levels were checked, their serotonin levels elevated
against post-shift depression. They were dressed in casual clothes carefully
selected from fashions sniffed at their Shift point. Jeans and shirts—styles
that had altered little for the better part of two centuries. Their target was
Washington, D.C. 50 years in the future, their purposes mixed.

This was a “peek” as opposed to a “poke”—both terms borrowed
from computer technology to indicate the scope of a mission. A peek was the
minimal mission—no planned contact with future residents, no touching. It was
little more than a manned sniff, which was done by a Totem, or Totable
Environmental Monitor—an instrument package designed to gather images, sounds
and environmental data on the Shift target. Sniffs, peeks and pokes usually
were run in that order, and future-pokes—which involved interacting with people
in the future—were relatively rare. There had been only a handful that Sharon
knew of in the 25 year history of QuestLabs.

Any Shift was, brief or no, an expensive proposition, so
Sharon and Trevor would be performing a number of tasks for QuestLabs, for
Stanford University and for the North American Parliament. It was a lot, Sharon
mused, standing in place on the Temporal Grid, like being a member of one of
the early space shuttle missions—performing a plethora of experiments in order
to maximize the cost-effectiveness of the trip. Now scientists traveled in time
and college students used the stock Horizontal Takeoff to Landing shuttles
regularly.

“Ready?” The question came from Shiro Tsubaki-Manyfeather,
seated at the console from which she would monitor their journey. Beside her,
fellow Lab Rat George Wu got baselines on their vital signs.

They nodded, gave a thumbs-up and waited while the Temporal
Grid powered up. A dancing veil of light motes shimmered in an aura around the
time travelers. The last thing Sharon Glen heard in 2091 was the sound of Shiro’s
soft voice counting down.

“Shifting . . . yellow plus one . . .
orange . . . plus one . . . red . . .”

The delicious tingle of the Shift cascaded down Sharon’s
back, colors chased vividly before her eyes—yellow, orange, red. Her heart rate
climbed. All delightfully normal. Only the colors were different; the past was
cool, its spectrum contained blues and violets; the future was ablaze.

They shifted in the space of perceived minutes, forward 50
years to a set of coordinates ascertained by Totem to be clear of obstacles or
traffic and close to their goal—the Library of Congress. The arrival
coordinates were in the basement of a parking structure one block from the
Library.

It could not have been more perfect. A cloak generated by
the Grid afforded them invisibility over an area of four square yards. In
practical terms, it allowed Sharon and Trevor to stroll into sight of any
bystanders as if they’d just come up on a nearby elevator. Blending in
completely with the contemporaries, they were just another pair of students
with backpacks and laundry lists of lookups.

Sharon quickly found that the hardest piece of Shift policy
to obey completely was the injunction to study the contemporaries without
appearing to study them. It was hard not to gawk at things that had changed
subtly or not so subtly: clothing, environment, architecture, people. Language
was expectedly and subtlety different, and snatches of conversation contained
colloquialisms that were familiar, but in unfamiliar contexts.

“That’s so tab,” said a middle-aged businessman to his
female cohort as they moved purposefully down the sidewalk.

To which she replied, “Well, Erin is such a straight-jacket
anyway, what other kind of investment could he make?”

“He could take a chance once in a while.”

“Erin? Take a chance? Like you said, he’s too tab.”

All of which showed the wisdom of Rule #14 in what the Lab
Rats affectionately called Time Travel for Dummies: Don’t use slang.

Once inside the Library’s main sanctuary, Sharon and Trevor
checked their wrist units for time and instructions. Sharon’s “specialty,” such
as it was, was the gathering of health and welfare data. She wasn’t sure
exactly how it had happened, but somehow a report on personal hygiene and
health she’d generated from a poke into Regency London had earned her a solid
reputation as a keen sorter of pertinent health data.

“Okay,” she said, “I think you’ve got the lion’s share of
work to do. Let me know if you need a hand.”

“You bet. Nobody ever accused me of taking on more work than
I have to. I’m sure you’ll be done long before I am.”

They parted, Sharon wafting on a wave of incredulity. No
matter how many times she shifted, she was always overcome at moments such as
these, by the sheer paradox of it all. This was work, this traveling through
the waves of time, and she was struck by the sheer banality of the conversation
she and Trevor had just had. Like a couple of students setting out to prepare
for oral exams. In that anomalous context, the Library of Congress was a
perfect symbol of Sharon’s calling. Aged stone and antique appointments
contrasted with the latest in information retrieval technology.

Sharon was gratified that the technology was still
recognizable. She located a VR bay, seated herself in its wrap-around seat and
looked for a helm and gloves. There were neither. There were only a pair of
flat screens about one foot on a side, that lay at approximately a 120 degree
angle to each other. It took ten minutes, but with the help of some written
instructions and careful surveillance of her nearest neighbors, she discovered
that the canted screen displayed two-dimensional data and the horizontal screen
displayed 3D holograms and served as a control panel.

She proceeded carefully through her checklist, delving into
health and census records, checking birth rates, noting how natural disasters
had affected the general health of the continent. That collection effort
completed, she moved on to the brave new world of medicine. It was bemusing,
she realized, as her task became more yawn-inducing, that a future-trip, for
all its novelty and the terrifying sense of awareness it provoked, was not
nearly as exciting as a trip to a less obscure past.

Alec would be in his early sixties now, she realized, and
wondered what kind of man he had become. Moved by something that was more than
curiosity, she toyed with the idea of entering his name into the search engine,
but her conscience bleated. She stuck to her agenda.

She was in a Who’s Who of medicine, when she found herself
staring at the name Alec Glen. She hesitated momentarily, for the link was not
strictly within her parameters, but in the end she followed the thread. What
came up was beyond a proud mother’s dreams, for the name Alec Glen had both
medical and political connections. Following her own inclination, Sharon
pointed to the medical connection.

He would become a doctor and a researcher in the field of
genetics. He would contribute to a cure for Hodgkin’s disease, would invent a
supplement to reverse osteoporosis, would write a seminal paper on age-related
dementia.

She was reveling in the glow of these discoveries when her
watch reminded her that time was wasting. She returned swiftly to her
legitimate research, downloading a sampling of medical research, trends,
breakthroughs and new problems. She added to the general mix her own son’s
contributions, wishing that Robert could be there to share her pride.

Sharon was still downloading when Trevor came to let her
know he had finished his own research. She stifled a twinge of guilt that her
digression might have cost her more legitimate research some time and tried not
to look at Trev’s face, lest it prompt him to ask her what was taking so long.
It was as she completed a final download of information to her recorder that
she dared to glance up and caught the flicker of something like worry in Trevor’s
eyes. He wasn’t looking at her, though, just staring up through the tall front
windows where a single wisp of cloud could be seen flung across the visible
patches of sky—an abstract painting on three tall canvases.

She poked her head out of the pod-chair. “What’s wrong,” she
asked, forgetting Rule #14, “The pol-scene got you jinky?”

“Ah . . . yeah. Yeah, you could say that.
Hey, it’s politics.” He checked the time. “You about ready?”

“Just.” She logged off, slipped her computer back into her
bag and could not resist the motherly temptation to glow. “I came across
something really interesting while I was searching. Alec’s name.”

Trevor’s surprise was evident. “Really? You did? In what
context?”

“As a noted researcher in genetics. He contributed to a cure
for Hodgkin’s and I gather, to a greater understanding of aging.”

“Wow,” Trevor said. “That’s quite a coincidence.” He took
her elbow and steered her toward the door. “Time’s a-wasting.”

“Not considering where I was peeking.”

“I just mean . . . I didn’t mean to imply you
were doing a personal peek. I just meant . . . Alec going into
medicine.”

“Science. He’s been around science all his life. Some of our
best friends are doctors and researchers. Besides, lately it seems as if
medical research of one sort or another is all I do. It’s just kind of good to
know . . . . I guess I’ve been a little worried.”

“I could tell.”

She stopped just outside the library’s main doors and smiled
up at him. “Well, aren’t you impressed?”

“Of course. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me all that much.
Alec’s a bright child—the child of bright parents.”

“I don’t suppose you came across him in your virtual
travels,” Sharon asked.

“What?” Trevor checked the time again and started down the
steps. “Why do you ask? I was pursuing a completely different line of research.”

Sharon shrugged, attempting nonchalance. “I found a couple of
links that suggested he had some political aspirations as well, that’s all. I
didn’t follow it—thought maybe you’d seen something. I just wondered . . .”

Trevor was silent long enough to make Sharon think he hadn’t
heard her or had gone off on one of his internal hikes. She glanced at him, her
mouth open, but he was not gazing into the distant hills of his mental outback.
There was an expression on his face she had seen only once before.

Zero at the core, she stopped walking, stopping Trevor as
well. “What’s the matter with you, Trevor? What did you find?”

“We need to get back to the Grid, Shar.” He took her arm.

She pulled it away. A woman passerby gave them a sharp
glance. Sharon lowered her voice and moved a step closer to Trevor. “Not until
you tell me what you’ve found. Something about Alec? What happens to him?”

Trevor lowered his head till their foreheads were touching
and the woman smiled and continued on her way. “Nothing happens to him,” he
murmured. “Except that he goes into politics. I thought you might be
disappointed. He apparently gave up his research to become a pol. Not exactly a
progression his dear mother would be happy about, am I right?”

“Good Lord, don’t tell me he had a party affiliation or
something like that?”

“No. No affiliation, but he was—or rather, will be—some sort
of lobbyist for the medical PAC.”

Sharon shrugged. “Okay. I’m not wild about lobbyists as a
rule, but at least it’s a good cause.”

Trev shook his head, straightened and smiled. “You’re no
fun, Shar. You’ve mellowed too much with age.”

“Jerk,” she called him. “Let’s go.”

oOo

Sharon could not have said what made her open Trevor’s
files. It was more than idle curiosity, less than suspicion. But she had known
Trevor Haley too long not to know when he was embarrassed or uncomfortable and
today, during the Shift, he had been both. The last time she’d seen that
expression on his face—that sudden skittering away of the eyes—was at a dinner
party when one of their colleagues had cracked a mean-spirited, misogynistic
joke about Magda Oslovski and her husband, Vance.

Sharon’s own data drop was complete by the time she had
changed her clothes and poured a cup of tea. She began riffling through her
collection, preparing an index and overview for a morning briefing. She allowed
herself a moment to linger lovingly over the information on Alec, then moved on
reluctantly.

She’d spent perhaps a half-hour at this when some perverse
demon drove her into Trevor’s domain. Anticipation building, she made a guilty
search for the name Alec Glen. The search came up dry.