The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (43 page)

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.

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.