Pinball (11 page)

They slept in one of many slave barracks that lined the perimeter of the castle courtyard. There were twelve beds in each barracks, and as it turned out, when Randolph had said there were slaves of any color, he meant it. Not only were there humans of every race, there were a number of the blue-skinned Vek’rathi, as well as four-armed, muscular beings that reminded Steven of the natives of Mars in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels. He later found that they were called Tarkans; they spoke no English, so he could only assume that they had been given that name by their captors because of their resemblance to Tars Tarkas of Barsoom.
What I wouldn’t give for a Dejah Thoris,
thought Stephen. He felt a sudden pang of guilt, thinking of Lynne and how his actions had screwed up their lives.

Sam had healed well from his injuries, but was silent and brooding. On the rare occasions that he spoke freely to his father, he expressed guilt that his desire to visit Centra had brought them to their present situation.

“Don’t feel that way,” Steven told him. “You didn’t have any way of knowing what we were getting ourselves into.” 

They had been in Centra for nearly five months when a guard came to the barracks door one evening. Approaching Steven, he said, “You’re to report to Brother Eleazer.”

Chapter 26

Eleazer’s austere office was on the topmost floor of the castle. Steven was escorted there by the guard who summoned him. When they arrived, the guard knocked on the heavy wooden door, and boomed, “The slave you requested is here, Brother Eleazer.”

They were directed to enter. Steven stood before the black-garbed priest, who sat at a large wooden table covered with books. “Leave us,” the priest said to the guard, who left immediately and closed the door.

“My apologies that I have no other seat for you, Steven,” said the priest. “I am Eleazer, and I am the keeper of the archives of Centra. I understand from information I have gleaned here and there that you have an interest in historical records, archival of information, this sort of thing. Is this correct?”

Steven stood silently.

“Oh, now, I know your stay here may not have been the most pleasant period of your life,” continued Eleazer, “but I have the ability to make things considerably more comfortable for you, should it appear that you are, shall we say,
suitable
for the task. Are you interested?”

Steven simply stared into space.

“Very well,” said the priest, “return to your —”

“Wait,” Steven interjected. “What do you need of me?”

A thin smile appeared on Eleazer’s lips. “What I
need,
” he said, “is someone who cares as much about preserving historical records as I do. There are those —” he grimaced slightly — “who are, shall we say, prone to manipulate the facts to suit their liking. I, on the other hand, would prefer to preserve the integrity of our archives at all costs. I cannot do this single-handedly; it is an insurmountable task for one man.”

“And you need an assistant.”

“Precisely.”

“I’d still be a slave.”

“In name only. You would be allowed to reside in the castle, in a room near the archive. You would be fed and clothed somewhat better than you are presently. You would not be called on to strain yourself at laborious tasks any longer.”

“I have a son.”

“What is your point?”

“I have a son, here in Centra. He was enslaved together with me. I want him to assist me.”

“Two assistants? A trifle excessive. I see no —”

“There’s some reason you asked for me. If you want me, I want my son. Those are my terms.”

The priest’s eyes narrowed. “Very well,” he intoned. 

Chapter 27

Steven and Samuel were moved from the slave barracks to a room in the castle directly downstairs from the archives. The first time that they were shown the archives, Steven’s eyes widened. It was a series of four interconnected rooms which took up an entire floor of one of the towers of the fortress. Each room was in the shape of a quarter circle, and Steven estimated that all four rooms together covered over four thousand square feet of floor space.

Each room was filled with wooden bookshelves; every wall was lined with them, floor to ceiling; rows of freestanding shelves filled the rest of the space. Every shelf was crammed full of books both ancient and modern, like the library he had seen in the other Centra, but this collection was many times as large.

Eleazer instructed him to review every volume on every shelf and write a synopsis in a ledger.
He wants me to create a goddamn card catalog,
Steven thought.
Well, at least it’ll keep us off hard labor.
He knew that the task would take years, perhaps decades.

Chapter 28

They had been at work cataloging the archive for nearly a full year when Steven ran across something that amazed him. On one of the shelves in the second room, Samuel found what seemed to be a college textbook on American History with a copyright date of 2077. He brought it to Steven’s attention and they both pored through it, hungry for any information about their lost home.

A number of items leapt out at Steven. The information on the first years of America’s past was routine: the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, George Washington as the first President… everything seemed normal enough. They read about the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, and the annexation of Texas in 1845. Then things seemed to veer away from the familiar.

According to the book, former Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln was running for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination and was preparing to deliver a speech at Cooper Union in New York when he was shot and killed by “an unidentified assailant in strange garb.” The murderer fled to the countryside, where pursuers lost his trail and he was never found. The report on the investigation noted that Lincoln’s killer wore a shirt and trousers of an odd mottled green and brown and was armed with a weapon the likes of which none of the agents had ever seen before.    

The Republican nomination eventually went to Salmon P. Chase, who subsequently lost the presidential election to Stephen A. Douglas, just as Randolph had said. When rumors arose that the Federal government was contemplating a ban on slavery, the Southern states threatened to secede, claiming that their economic wellbeing hinged on the availability of slave labor. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina’s state legislature voted for secession. By February of 1861, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas had followed suit.

After the inauguration of President Douglas on March 4, 1861, these seven states signed an agreement in which they said that they could not “in good conscience remain aligned with the United States” and declared that they were a new nation, the Confederate States of America. Douglas, an advocate of states’ rights, issued a Presidential proclamation granting them the right to secede and welcoming the CSA to “the world family of nations.”

As Randolph had said, the Civil War, that bloody conflict which pitted brother against brother,
never happened.
Subsequently, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina also joined the CSA. Richmond, Virginia became its capitol, and it, along with Washington, became known as the Twin Capitols of the Americas.

History became even more divergent in the 20
century. The U.S. remained a neutral power throughout World War I, but the Confederacy immediately sided with the French against Germany and heavily shifted the balance of the war toward the side of the Allies. After the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, the CSA ratified the Treaty of Versailles which established the League of Nations, while the U.S. became increasingly isolationist. In 1920, the United States granted women the right to vote, while the Confederacy did not do so until 1965.

The prosperity which followed the end of the war came to a crashing end when a worldwide economic crisis began with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, triggering a global depression, which seemed even more severe and widespread than what Steven recalled learning about when he was a schoolboy.

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt became president of the United States, while around the same time Huey Long of Louisiana was elected president of the Confederacy. The two men decided to work together to foster a policy of economic cooperation which ultimately became known as the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1934, in which the two nations worked together to create programs that would strengthen their mutual economies.

On September 8, 1935, Long was in his home state, scheduled to address the Louisiana state legislature. As he walked to the legislative chamber, he was shot by Dr. Carl Weiss, who was subsequently shot sixty-one times by Secret Service agents and police officers. Long’s last words were “I wonder why he shot me.” Vice President Paul Cyr succeeded Long as CSA president.

Much of the following material was familiar; in 1933, Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany, and the increasing German aggression erupted into World War II on September 1, 1939 when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. At that point, the historical record began once more to diverge. Again, the two Americas were divided in their loyalties; this time, the Confederacy remained neutral while the U.S. provided aid to Britain and France. The Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States entered the war. At Roosevelt’s urging, CSA President Douglas MacArthur pushed the Confederate legislature to declare war on the Axis powers and join the Allies. In this timeline, Steven read, World War II lasted until 1950, as the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki never took place. Instead, an invasion of the Japanese homeland was mounted in late 1949, involving troops from the U.S., the Confederacy and the Soviet Union. The invasion was ultimately successful, but cost the lives of nearly a half million Allied troops. Weakened by this, the Allies did not respond when North Korea invaded South Korea and the entire peninsula went Communist within six months.

In 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and CSA President Harry F. Byrd negotiated what they called “the reunification of a nation,” in which the Confederate states, divided from the U.S. for a century, rejoined the Union. The CSA had technically done away with slavery in the 1930s, but Jim Crow laws and racist practices still continued. In 1965, Federal legislation was passed that guaranteed civil rights for all citizens regardless of race or gender, granting universal suffrage to blacks and women as well as all other minorities.

On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas by a pro-CSA activist named Oswald Lee Harvey, who ran up to the presidential limousine as it passed by and fired two shots into Kennedy’s head, crying out “Sic semper tyrannis!”

Steven skipped to the last chapter of the text and saw that it detailed the economic collapse of the United States beginning in 2017 and 2018, and its eventual merger — he found the use of that term odd, considering the fact that it was referring to nations, not corporations — into the United States of AmerAsia in 2022.

Steven sat, musing over all the odd little twists and turns that history had taken in this timeline, when Samuel brought him a small pamphlet he had found on one of the shelves. The front cover read as follows:

GUARDIAN Series Owner and Operators Manual

North Central Positronics, Inc.

Granite City, Northeast Corridor, USAA

©2666 Sombra Group Ltd - All Rights Reserved

He felt a jolt of excitement as he opened the little book. It seemed to be printed on some sort of plasticine material, and felt almost slimy in his hands. It was filled with technical information on several types of mechanical creatures, and on page 37 he found what he was looking for: Mini-Guardian Type 1, with illustrations showing front and side views of the metal bird he remembered so well as well as an exploded view indicating the various component parts.

He paged back through the guide, examining the illustrations of the various Guardians and Mini-Guardians. The Guardians listed were in the form of a turtle, a bear, a fish, a wolf, an elephant, a rat, a bat, a lion, a horse, a rabbit, an ox and an eagle. From the notes, he gathered that these were enormously powerful and that only one of each model existed. He breathed a sigh of relief that it apparently wasn’t one of these that came through the Gate that November day that seemed so long ago.

He continued, reading about the Mini-Guardians now. Type 1 was the birdlike sort he’d encountered when this roller coaster ride began. Type 2 was similar to the Guardian Wolf, but was roughly eight feet in length rather than the 35 feet described for the Guardian. Type 3 was a twenty foot serpent that resembled a gigantic cobra, and type 4 looked like a chrome plated thirty foot prehistoric shark.
I hope I never go for a swim and meet that fucker,
Steven thought.

“So the Northeast Corridor must be a district in the AmerAsia of the 25
century,” said Steven to no one in particular. Samuel had gone off to find more books of interest, so Steven thumbed through to the appendices in the back of the Guardian users guide and froze. There, in Appendix IX, he read the words:
GU
ardian
A
ngel
R
obotic
DI
mension
A
l Gate
N
avigator. GUARDIAN.

Steven devoured the information in the little pamphlet, scouring it for any data about the purpose and use of the Guardians, and wondering how the pamphlet came to be in the archives of the priesthood.

As he read, he realized that the Guardian line used some kind of technology that, if he understood the terminology correctly, actually opened Gates on command and transported the unit, not simply into the Gatespace, but directly through a connecting Gate to the desired space-time location beyond. What he couldn’t seem to comprehend was how you determined what Gate you wanted to connect to, or where that Gate led to.