The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (52 page)

One thing it meant for sure: a lot of phone calls to the FBI’s Report an Anomaly line. Unless we found Dutch Lop fast, Horejsi and I were about to have to do an absolute mountain of paperwork.

The moment I walked in the door, I told Horejsi about seeing that brown-skinned family – speaking English! – on the streets of Denver. “So Peron’s change was at least big enough to undo some part of the Great Erasure. No wonder the Bureau set us such a large bonus. When they tried to measure significance, the isotemporal estimating engine must have spun till the needle broke,” I finished.

Even Horejsi, with not a digit or an equation in her head, was gaping. “I think,” she said, after a bit, “we’d better get over to that Geiger bank, and see what we can find. I don’t think we have any time to spare, so I’d better come along, even if some of your informants are scared of the Bug-Eye Lady.”

“They can’t be any more scared than I am right now,” I said.

We talked on the train, just the usual sort of thing we’d talk about on a case, I guess because the unusual stuff about this case scared the crap out of us.

It was Christmas shopping season, and the Com’n levrail was jammed. Just to get privacy, we had to spend some extra expense account money for a compartment. Even though with the window dimmed, we didn’t need the cover of pretending to be a couple, Horejsi slid around to sit closer to me on the bench seat than was polite; I could have put an arm around her. Of course I was Liejt and she was Com’n; that would mean her vanishing. Even a person as socially isolated as I was couldn’t forget that. But I kept noticing how easily my arm would have gone around her.

They recruited people like me and Horejsi for our freak memories and social isolation. If the last two digits in the GDP of the Untitled States of Armorica reversed, I’d notice that the book was now “wrong,” and if the Third Rogue’s Speech in Love’s Labours’ Won changed “thou’st’ll” to “you’ll’ve,” Horejsi would pick it up. She’d already been most of the way through Chaucer, the writer nearest to the change point that she had in memory, and said all she noticed was “just three little changes, the kind of collateral connections you get because some printer’s apprentice died in childbirth and her replacement made an alternate typo. Which reminds me of a weird thing – I scanned the list of all the printer’s apprentices in the Registry of Known Persons for London 1300–99 Third Edition and it was just like I remembered, but in Registry of Known Persons for London 1400–99 Second Edition Revised all the girls’ names had disappeared.”

“Maybe they had a fad for naming girls after boys?” I suggested.

“All of them? There’s no such thing as a one hundred per cent fad in baby names. And there were plenty of girls in several other crafts. So our boy did something to the printing industry.” Horejsi sounded pissed off.

The train glided into the big shopping center they have south of downtown these days – I remember when it appeared there, some guy named Varian who had jumped back to try to tell Mussolini to break away from Hitler and kick out the Pope. It took us forever to find Varian’s ballast because it was a pretty girl who only spoke Neolatin. It turned out that one of the Free Irish gangs found her when she first appeared in Varian’s neighborhood, enslaved her, and sold her south to Mexespana. “This wasn’t a bad shopping center to get out of the deal, as long as we had to fail on a case,” I said. “Lots of jobs and it’s kind of pretty.”

Horejsi’s apertures focused on me. My as-usual-lame attempt at small talk had only pissed her off more. “It was hard on that poor girl. Let’s not have too many failures if we can help it. Anyway, I think the London registry anomaly shows us that whatever Peron is doing to make a mess of the past, it’s pretty bad.”

She got mad whenever a case involved gender. I’d probably made her madder by bringing up the Varian case, because so much awful shit had happened to the ballast girl.

I grasped her arm and pointed as I turned left down the next sidewalk, to remind her we were going to the levrail station on the north side of the center; since we were in public it was important that there be no affection in it, and I’m sure I was careful. Nevertheless, she curled her arm upward and brought my hand into hers. This was all right too; we did it often when pretending to be a couple, and the FBI said it was fine as long as I didn’t initiate. I didn’t know why we’d need a cover. Maybe she just wanted to hold hands. That was all right with me.

“This case is beginning to scare the shit out of me,” she said.

Mad, then scared, liked to hold hands to feel better afterwards. I filed that under the mental heading of “understanding Horejsi.” Long ago I had noticed she liked being understood.

We had some time before the next train, so we walked slowly through the fake Victorian shops, or “shoppes” as most of them insisted on being spelled. A lot of the shops had dressed their Irish in old time costumes, so there were bonnets and top hats and so forth everywhere in the glaring winter sun, and every other vendor selling indulgences or bratwurst was dressed like one of Santa’s leprechauns. It was a little creepy, I thought; I could remember when I was a kid, leprechauns had been entirely monsters that the slaves might conjure up to turn loose on us, but something had slipped or come undone somewhere in time, since then, and there was now a tradition of bad monster leprechauns and good obedient leprechauns.

“Do you remember when leprechauns were all bad?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” Horejsi said. “That was the thing that changed my whole life. When I was nineteen, I was babysitting for a rich family, reading a story to the kids, and one day, in exactly the same old dog-eared ruin of a book I’d read to them a dozen times, Willy Wonka had good leprechauns working in the chocolate factory. I told my mother about it, and she turned me in to the cops.”

“And then they turned you into a cop.”

“Yeah.” She made her smile-grimace; I guess she liked my joke. Maybe that was why she squeezed my arm tighter. “Christmas is pretty. I hope nothing ever happens to change it.” I could tell she was happy, maybe about the decorations? Didn’t people usually say that at night instead of in bright sun?

Aside from our freak memories, the FBI used us because we didn’t relate to people much. Interacting with the ballast jumpers barely changed us and anyway it wouldn’t matter because we interacted so little with other people. Horejsi and me, we’re like “people without souls,” that’s what it said when I hacked in to read the documentation about ballast hunters.

What the hell. I liked the job. It was rarely dull, it used many of my skills, and it had made me a rich man, rich even beyond my Liejt allowance. And if we didn’t have souls, Horejsi and I still had some fun and were company for each other, now and then.

We got on the Com’n northbound that would take us to the slums east of downtown, and took another private compartment. It would be fifteen minutes before the train actually moved, but we had more than enough things to talk about in the privacy of the compartment.

It was always possible that Dutch Lop would be at Brock’s Geiger bank, and talk to us. Naturally we hoped so, but it didn’t seem likely. When the ballasts had been living rough on the street, they were often cooperative, but if he was the cruncher at Brock’s, he wasn’t poor, and he had some kind of a life he might be attached to.

I brought that up to Horejsi and she touched my hand – she was still sitting very close – and said, “Whose favorite phrase is ‘theorizing in advance of data’?”

It took me a moment to get it. “Mine,” I admitted.

“Well?”

“Yeah.” She made that weird grimace she does instead of a grin; another thing Horejsi likes is being right.

We talked through a review of what we knew. “How bad was the weather this spring?” Horejsi asked. “I never remember weather.”

“Three spring blizzards after his date of arrival, and that bad cold snap we had in late March – it was minus seven Celsius on March 28 and minus three on March 29.”

She nodded, letting apertures open all over the spheres of her eyes, taking in all of the nice, crisp December day through the big window, as the train lifted off and glided through the downtown. “Then definitely, he found friends and shelter of some kind, right away, and something fed him,” she said. “No true isolation possible.”

The trick with breaking the causality between the traveler and his ballast was to grab and de-link the ballast as early as possible; create a situation in which the easiest Inconsistency Principle resolution would be that the ballast had always existed in our world and the time traveler had not. Then intemporia would take over and work on our side, erasing most of the changes. But for best effect, we had to de-link them early.

This one wouldn’t be early.

Of course you could also deal with human ballast the way we dealt with ballasts of mud or logs or deer; scramble it, chemically treat it, and scatter it. Most ballast hunters just didn’t like luring or kidnapping people to have them ground to bits and vaporized. Horejsi and I had occasionally muttered a suspicion to each other – that the Whenness Prophylaxis Program was just a preliminary step to make us investigators more comfortable, and that as soon as we were off the case, the ballast ended up as extremely overcooked sausage. I shuddered.

“Cold?” Horejsi asked.

“No, just thinking of something grim.”

“That family you saw means this is something huge,” she said, “and the bonus the FBI set makes a lot more sense now.”

We both knew that, but maybe it was comforting for her to keep saying things we both knew.

We got off at the Welton Station, and paused to let a Liejt levrail shoot by us, the D line, hurrying down Welton to Smallville. I wondered if the world would still be there when they got there, or if they’d still be the same people. It gave me the creeps.

Horejsi’s hand was on my arm again. I covered it with my other hand, to keep it there, because it felt kind of good.

It was still bright and sunny but the wind was picking up in a way that could feel like a nail driven up my nose, and the dry cold air seemed to tear at my skin. The Christmas wreaths and banners on the lampposts whipped and slapped alarmingly; I felt sorry for the poor Irish slaves who had had to put them up.

Changing the subject, she asked, “How many disturbances do you know about so far?” She kept her hand on my arm. I was grateful.

“A lot of statistics aren’t what they used to be,” I said. “Baseball looks like it’s more fun – scores are higher, all the statistics about stealing home from fourth base vanished, and teams are nine players instead of eleven – center and right shortstop are combined, and there’s no wing fielder.”

“And this is interesting because – ”

“Enormous number of public stadiums built to a different design, enormous number of records altered, lots of very public lives altered, and not in a way that maps one to one. Economics is pretty much the same – three of the main estimating components of the Gross Dominion Product are gone, replaced by something called ‘foreign trade,’ but that looks more like a change of bookkeeping. But the census tabulation changed drastically for the last hundred years, and the date when they started mining coal up in the high country is one hundred four years later.”

Horejsi whistled. “Those are some big mass-time changes. Which fits with that . . . anomaly . . . you saw.”

“Brown-skinned people wouldn’t use as much coal?” I asked, puzzled by what she meant.

“No, silly, I mean the change of skills.” She nodded at the Irishmen walking on the street-side sidewalk ahead of us; each was carrying home his coal ration and his little Thermos of LOX for his Franklin stove. “I’m sure any Irishmen that the brown-skinned people owned would use as much coal as anyone else. It’s just – their existence – the scale of that change . . . well, it’s consistent with changes as big as the ones you describe. That’s what I mean.” She sighed and rubbed her hand gently up and down my arm, brushing my coat sleeve and pressing a knuckle hard enough for me to feel it in my muscles. “Rastigevat, there were some big physical things in the last few hours. I-70 jumped down to Albuquerque, then up to Cheyenne and for a while ran along the path of US-50, yesterday, so we had a large number of lost and angry truckers and some cargoes just gone. About seventy of those weird little passenger-only trucks that show up sometimes during anomalies drove into Pueblo over the temporary I-70; most of the people who arrived in them are acquiring new memories right now, though a few have just vanished. Three whole train cars of Irish that were going to be put to work in Aspen for the holidays are just gone, along with all their titles and registration. And what that I in I-70 stands for changes from Intergovernmental to Interim to Imperial and back to Interstate all the time.”

“Where was Denver when I-70 jumped?” I asked.

“Do you remember what we were doing yesterday?”

I thought for a moment. “Is today Tuesday?”

“Thursday.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. It’s a big mess, Rastigevat. Huge cultural changes too – the name of this continent keeps fluctuating between Armorica, Amorica, and Amocira, and every so often turning back into New Armorica, which is what they called it right after the airships found it and the Great Erasure started. Twice it has wavered into New Arimathea, which I guess means a more religious trend somewhere in the past, and once it was North Arimacha, which I don’t get at all. Three changes in Chaucer, thousands of different names in the London Registries, renamed ships with drastically different names in standard histories of England and the Untitled States, the Enlightenment 150 years later and all of history since then compressed to fit.