The Time Traveler's Almanac (149 page)

Those firemen did good work. Within an hour the flames had subsided. The charred timbers sent plumes of smoke high into the air, but the fire was dead.

Shivering, I watched as the bodies were carried out: blackened beyond recognition, more like burned logs than people. Nine corpses, nine flaking, reeking corpses. And one more, smaller than the rest. The last to be brought out. Rainbow.

“Found her by the back window.” The fireman’s face was blackened, his voice hoarse. “I think she was trying to open it and get out. But the damned thing was painted shut.” Gently he set her down. “Jesus, I’ve got two at home around her age. Damned shame.”

“Yeah.” I didn’t trust myself to say more. Quickly as I could, I turned around and got out of there. I spent the night at a neighbor’s house. The next morning, I waited until my Good Samaritan had left for work at the shipyards, then I plugged in the transport, set it for autoretrieve, and took MacHeath back to realtime, right into Jerry Raskin’s office.

*   *   *

“You son of a bitch!” I grabbed him by the lapel of his cheap silver coat. “You knew that place was going to burn down when you rented it to me.”

“What?” He stared at my soot-stained face and there was real fear in his eyes. “I had no idea. Chrissy, you’ve got to believe me.”

I shook him until his teeth chattered. “You are required by law to do a time sweep in order to alert tenants to potential dangers.”

“I did. I did. The records came up clean. The former owner must have lied to the insurance company.”

“Reckless endangerment,” I said. “How does that sound, for starters? How would you like to be charged with a felony?”

Raskin’s eyes were huge with terror now. I put him down and he backed away from me until the desk separated us. “Now let’s just calm down,” he said. “You look okay to me. You got out all right, didn’t you? I’ll refund your deposit. I swear, I didn’t know.”

I decided not to waste my energy. Raskin wasn’t worth it. Back I went to Yuba City. Found a studio apartment that almost had room for me and MacHeath. Tried to forget.

By day it was easy. San Francisco put on her best show for me: The Golden Gate Bridge glistened in the sunlight. The bay was dotted by solar-powered sailboats. The cable cars’ recorded bells rang. The scent of coffee and chocolate wafted up from the power-blowers installed at Ghiradelli Square. My work was blessedly absorbing.

But at night my dreams were filled with little girls with dirty faces and large blue eyes, terrified little girls with their hands and faces pressed against a wall of unyielding glass as flames raced up behind them.

“Help,” they cried. “Help me, Mommy!”

“Help me, Daddy!”

“Help me, Christine!”

*   *   *

On my way to work one morning, I glanced through the window as we pulled into Powell Station. Another train had come in on the parallel track, and in it a small girl with big blue eyes stared at me with great seriousness. Her hands were pressed against the window. I looked down at my net paper. When I looked up again, she was gone. But two small handprints smudged the glass where she had been.

That night I went back.

I went back to 1968 and stood outside the house and watched as the fire gained strength. Watched, paralyzed, as choking smoke billowed upward. Saw a woman – me – peer out the upstairs window with fierce, frightened eyes as she held an orange cat in her arms. Was that severe face really mine? I didn’t have time to wonder.

I saw a flash at the downstairs window. A small face, eyes huge. Rainbow, struggling with the latch. The smoke filled the room behind her. She beat against the window, coughing.

I moved, then. Picked up a rock.

The fire engines howled in the distance.

I saw myself coming down the stairs and darted to the side, out of sight, quickly, quickly, until I knew that I was putting MacHeath in the car with my back to the house.

Awkwardly, then, I changed history. Smashed the window. Reached through jagged glass that scratched my hands and arms, grabbed the child, and pulled her through. The flames chased her right up to the edge of the sill, but they couldn’t have her. No. Not this time.

Rainbow clung to me, sobbing, and I rocked her gently.

“It’s okay, honey,” I whispered. My hands smeared blood and soot on her face. I didn’t care. She was alive.

When she had calmed enough to fall into an exhausted sleep, I handed her to a neighbor and crept away. I didn’t want anybody to notice that there were two of me there.

Back in realtime, I took a long shower, bandaged my wounds, and had two glasses of smooth old scotch, vintage 1991.

*   *   *

The next morning, I called in a favor from Jimmy Wu, keeper of the SFPD database.

“Her name’s Rainbow.”

Good old Jimmy searched for her, beginning in late 1968. He looked and looked for Rainbow. He never found a trace of her.

“Shit, Chrissy,” he said. “They were all called Rainbow that year. “Or Morning Star or Peacelove. I need a real name, like Tammy or Katie or Sarah, and a social security number. A last name would be really nice.”

So the trail fizzled out in the backyard of a smoldering house on Potrero Hill, fifty-six years ago. And nothing anomalous ever happened that I could detect – not one ripple of difference in the timeline. MacHeath didn’t turn green, I didn’t grow wings. San Francisco glittered as always in the chilly summer sunlight. I guess some people are just throwaway people. They don’t make any difference at all, in any time.

Did she survive to adulthood? Or did she overdose in some gas station bathroom near Reseda when she was twelve? Did I break every time law on the books merely to postpone her fate? I don’t know – but I do know one thing. I sleep better now.

The rhythms of routine distracted me. My cuts healed. My memories receded to a comfortable distance.

*   *   *

About three days ago, I got a call from a real estate agent in the Castro.

“Christine? I got your name from Jerry Raskin.”

“I’m not interested in downtime apartments.”

She laughed a breathy laugh. “Oh, I only deal in realtime estate. And I’ve got two places I want to show you. The first is a beauty: a three-bedroom apartment in the Potrero Hill area. Upstairs and down. Used to be a two-family unit. You’ve got to see it to believe it.”

Everything inside me stilled to a whisper. I could see the window again, that window with its small dirty fingerprints.

“Hello? Hello?”

Somehow I found my voice. “I’ve seen it.”

“But that’s impossible. This apartment just came on the market.”

“Believe me, I’ve seen it. In fact, you might say that I’ve spent way too much time on it already.” And then I hung up.

TWENTY-ONE, COUNTING UP

Harry Turtledove

Harry Turtledove is an American writer and editor best known for his work in science fiction, alternate histories, and historical fiction. With well over twenty novels and hundreds of short stories, his work has been nominated for just about every award in the industry. He has won the Hugo, the Sidewise, and the Prometheus awards. “Twenty-one, Counting Up” was first published in
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
in 1999. It is a companion piece to his other story in this anthology, “Forty, Counting Down,” which features the same main character, Justin Kloster.

Justin Kloster looked from his blue book to his watch and back again. He muttered under his breath. Around him, a hundred more people in the American history class were looking at their watches, too. Fifteen minutes left. After that, another breadth requirement behind him. His junior year behind him, too. Three down, one to go.

At precisely four o’clock, the professor said, “Time! Bring your blue books up to the front of the lecture hall.”

Like everybody else, Justin squeezed out another couple of sentences before doing as he was told. He wrung his hand to show writer’s cramp, then stuck the pen in the pocket of his jeans and headed for the door.

“How do you think you did?” somebody asked him.

“I’m pretty sure I got a B, anyhow,” he answered. “That’s all I really need. It’s not like it’s my major or anything.” The prof could hear him, but he didn’t much care. This wasn’t a course for history majors, not that Cal State Northridge had many of those. It was a school for training computer people like him, business types, and teachers. After a moment, he thought to ask, “How about you?”

“Probably about the same,” the other fellow said. “Well, have a good summer.”

“Yeah, you, too.” Justin opened the door and stepped from air conditioning and pale fluorescent light into the brassy sun and heat of the San Fernando Valley. He blinked a couple of times as his eyes adapted. Sweat started pouring off him. He hurried across campus to the parking lot where his Toyota waited. He was very blond and very fair, and sunburned if you looked at him sideways. He was also a little – only a little – on the round side, which made him sweat even more.

When he unlocked the car, he fanned the door back and forth a couple of times to get rid of the furnacelike air inside. He cranked the AC as soon as he started the motor. After he’d gone a couple of blocks, it started doing some good. He’d just got comfortable when he pulled into the gated driveway of his apartment building.

The Acapulco was like a million others in Los Angeles, with a below-ground parking lot and two stories of apartments built above it around a courtyard that held a swimming pool, a rec room, and a couple of flower beds whose plants kept dying.

The key that opened the security gate also opened the door between the lot and the lobby. Justin checked his snailmail and found, as he’d hoped, a check from his father and another from his mother. His lip curled as he scooped the envelopes from his little mailbox. His folks had gone through a messy divorce his senior year in high school. These days, his father was living with a redheaded woman only a couple of years older than he was – and his mother was living with a dark-haired woman only a couple of years older than he was. They both sent money to help keep him in his apartment … and so they wouldn’t have to have anything more to do with him. That suited him fine. He didn’t want to have anything to do with them these days, either.

He used the security key again to get from the lobby to the courtyard behind it, then walked back to his apartment, which wasn’t far from the rec room. That had worried him when he first rented the place, but hardly anybody played table tennis or shot pool or lifted weights, so noise wasn’t a problem.

His apartment was no neater than it had to be. His history text and lecture notes covered the kitchen table. He chuckled as he shoved them aside. “No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks,” he chanted – and how long had people escaping from school been singing that song? He grabbed a Coke from the refrigerator and started to sit down in front of the space he’d cleared. Then he shook his head and carried the soda back into the bedroom instead.

He really lived there. His iMac sat on a desk in a corner by the closet. Justin grinned when he booted it up. It didn’t look like all the boring beige boxes other companies made. As soon as the desktop came up, he logged onto Earthlink to check his e-mail and see what was going on in some of the newsgroups he read.

None of the e-mail was urgent, or even very interesting. The newsgroups … “How about that?” he said a couple of minutes later. Dave and Tabitha, who’d both been posting in the Trash Can Sinatras newsgroup for as long as he’d been reading it, announced they were getting married. Justin sent congratulations. He hoped they’d get on better than his own folks had. His girlfriend’s parents were still together, and still seemed to like each other pretty well.

Thinking of Megan made him want to talk to her. He logged off Earthlink – having only one line in the apartment was a pain – and went over to the phone on the nightstand. He dialed and listened to it ring, once, twice … “Hello?” she said.

“What’s the story, morning glory?” Justin said – Megan was wild for Oasis. He liked British pop, too, though he preferred Pulp, as someone of his parents’ generation might have liked the Stones more than the Beatles.

“Oh. Hiya, Justin.” He heard the smile in her voice once she recognized his. He smiled, too. With exams over for another semester, with his girlfriend glad to hear from him, the world looked like a pretty good place. Megan asked, “How’d your final go?”

“Whatever,” he answered. “I don’t think it’s an A, but I’m pretty sure it’s a B, and that’s good enough. Want to go out tonight and party?”

“I can’t,” Megan told him. “I’ve got my English lit final tomorrow, remember?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s right.” Justin hadn’t remembered till she reminded him. “I bet you’re glad to get through with most of that lower-division stuff.” She was a year behind him.

“This wasn’t so bad.” Megan spoke as if telling a dark, shameful secret: “I kind of like Shakespeare.”

“Whatever,” Justin said again. All he remembered from his literature course was that he’d been damn lucky to escape with a B-minus. “I’ll take you to Sierra’s. We can get margaritas. How’s that?”

“The bomb,” Megan said solemnly. “What time?”

“How about six-thirty? I start at CompUSA tomorrow, and I’ll get off a little past five.”

“Okay, see you then,” Megan said. “I’ve got to get back to
Macbeth.
’Bye.” She hung up.

Justin put
This Is Hardcore,
his favorite Pulp album, in the CD player and pulled dinner out of the freezer at random. When he saw what he had, he put it back and got another one: if he was going to Sierra’s tomorrow night, he didn’t want Mexican food tonight, too. Plain old fried chicken would do the job well enough. He nuked it, washed it down with another Coke, then threw the tray and the can in the trash and the silverware into the dishwasher. When he started running out of forks, he’d get everything clean at once.

He went back into the bedroom, surfed the Net without much aim for a while, and then went over to bungie.com and got into a multiplayer game of
Myth II.
His side took gas; one of the guys didn’t want to follow their captain’s orders, even though his own ideas were a long way from brilliant. Justin logged off in disgust. He fired up his
Carmageddon
CD-ROM and happily ran down little old ladies in walkers till he noticed in some surprise that it was after eleven. “Work tomorrow,” he sighed, and shut down and went to bed.