The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (51 page)

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):

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.”

Pickles was an informant for everyone – Police, ATF, us, No Such Agency, and all her local crime gangs, probably more I didn’t know about. What you told Pickles, you told everyone; I wanted Dutch Lop to know I was looking for him.

I had the same conversation with four similar informants in two more bars within a decimile of Alvarez Peron’s apartment. I heard, twice more, that Dutch Lop was a cruncher for Brock’s Geiger bank.

A Geiger bank is just a numbers game or a bollita that gets extra cachet by using Geiger counters sitting on a block of vitrified nuclear waste to generate the digits. Weird that 4-11-44 was still a popular combo, a 150 years since Sherman’s bombers cratered every railroad yard from Atlanta to the sea; things persist in the Irish parts of town.

Anyway, it wasn’t the ghetto of today, but the Bohemian cheap-rent districts of 600 years before that I should be thinking about. Southwark in 1388 had been home to a few eccentric artists and scientists, like Chaucer, Dunstaple, Leonel Power, and Tyrwhitt, a smattering of fashionable young aristocrats, and a lot of garden-variety crooks.

Given that the numbers game is old – Fibonacci mentions it in the same text where he explains Arabic numbers – no doubt there had been plenty of people who knew how to set the line in Southwark in 1388, and if one of them had been dragged forward as Peron’s ballast, he’d certainly have been employable enough anywhere around that neighborhood. That much made some kind of sense.

Having sown enough word that I was looking for Dutch Lop, I headed for Brock’s. Horejsi often chided me for always taking the direct approach, but I had two good reasons: it often worked and I didn’t understand any others.

My phone said, “Horejsi’s calling,” and I said, “Accept.”

In her usual tone of mild amusement, she asked, “Well, do you believe in my added categories yet?”

I smiled flatly toward my phone, tilting the screen to pick up my face, and said, “More evidence that Peron fits your category six?”

“Maybe. Back at your place in say an hour?”

“Sure, I don’t have any reason to hurry to the next place I’m trying.”

“See you there.” She hung up. One of a lot of things I like about Horejsi. Didn’t bother with that silly “God ble’ye” that so many people still did. Finish talking, hit the switch, like a sensible person.

I turned back to catch the Liejt-reserved levrail to my place; I’d get there before Horejsi, who had to ride the Com’n.

A whole family of people with brown skins was walking up the sidewalk. They looked exactly like the ones I had seen preserved in museums, except they wore clothes, and were talking among themselves.

With all the training, I can keep a straight face. I don’t react much to anything, anyway. Even so, this was probably the biggest challenge to my deadpan ever.

I managed. I looked at them but no more intently than an absent minded man thinking of nothing would look, and smiled.

The grandfather of the group – there were also a mother, father, and two young children – glanced at me, smiled back, and said, in a sort-of-Confederate accent, “Beautiful day, isn’t it? Don’t you love a sunny day in Denver?”

“I was just thinking that,” I said. “Clear and bright and not too cold.”

He nodded pleasantly, and we passed on our respective ways. I didn’t let myself run, or grab the phone, or even think too much.

That brown-skinned family had to be the biggest casopropagation anomaly I’d ever seen, and I’d seen plenty. This case must be a billion times bigger than I’d guessed.

Schrödinger’s modification to Einstein showed why, although usually changes that least altered energy, causality, or entropy propagated earliest, every so often something big popped up ahead of the small changes.

You’d expect that modern electronic stuff changes rapidly because it’s just flipping some qdots into alternate states. After that, old style electronic records change, because that takes only a few thousand electron volts per bit. Paper records might require as much as a single calorie per page, so in the fluctuations of twenty years or so, those change. Finally, gross things – changes of shipwreck locations, emptying and filling graves, shapes of furniture and buildings, placements of trees and roads – take many megajoules, or more, and change across a century, the ones least entangled with others first.

The thing that affects other things the least, and requires the most complex rewriting, is long-term memory in the brains of socially isolated people. That doesn’t change until it has to, and ghost versions persist in a few heads until the hermit, or monk under vow of silence – or lonely oddball like me or Horejsi – finally dies.

Now don’t ask me about the math. I relate to numbers, not math. I can tell you that 524,287 is a Mersenne prime because it just obviously is, but if you want me to find an eigenvector or a derivative, you’ll have to send me to the tweenweb to find the guy that already did.

If you don’t understand the difference between those two abilities, you wouldn’t understand the math – just as I don’t.

But according to Herr Doctor Schrödinger, once there’s been a change in history, some changes propagate out of order and out of proportion, because the dimensions of conservation are curved and imperfectly orthogonal. (I can almost picture that in my head.) One consequence is surprising inconsistencies in the real world, during the time between the backward departure and the forward resolution, so that long before a couple million quantum computers remember all sorts of different things and frequently consulted dictionaries change the spellings of forty words, a freeway is nine yards west and was built four years earlier. Another is that huge things may change and small things remain the same; Horejsi and I both remembered a four-hour interval when Denver had been named Auraria, and been Espano speaking, but all the RTD levrails had run on the same exact schedules.

Schrödinger’s equations also showed why any change, great or small, may or may not persist when the original change is undone; as he said, once you had a cat in a box, if you eliminated its parents, then you either had no cat or a different cat that was exactly the same, and you wouldn’t know till you looked. A bridge in Pittsburgh might be there intermittently for a couple of years; the statue of Athena in New York Harbor might permanently change to Dolley Madison or Elizabeth Cady Stanton; the passengers on a Frontier gravliner alighting on the concourse at Denver International might catch a glimpse of what appeared to be a Civil War-era winged rocket with Frontier markings taking off.

Those casopropagation anomalies are in proportion to the overall scale of the change that was made in the past. So whatever it was that Peron had done in 1388 in London, it had caused a kind of people who had not existed in 400 years to appear on the street in Denver, speaking English and sounding a bit like imported Irish slaves.