Time Past Read online

Since beginning work at the Assembly, I’d collected all the articles on Alvarez that I could find and downloaded as much information as I could from the infonet. And one memorable day, I watched her speak. It was a recording of a speech made shortly before she died.

  It was early morning in the out-town about two months after I arrived. In the Assembly office Florence and I would work from seven to eleven, go home because it was too hot, then come back for a couple of hours in the evening.

  On this particular morning, I found a reference to Alvarez in a file our computer could download, so I did, and fed it into “run video.”

  I cried out with surprise and slapped my hand over my mouth. Florence looked up from sealing envelopes.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I mumbled, but she came and stood behind me.

  “Alvarez? That’s the San Diego speech, I think.” Florence nodded to herself. “The only time she left her own country.”

  I wasn’t interested in the details. The captions running at the bottom of the screen, the two smaller windows at the top that showed an edited history of the village and an explanation of the San Diego rally; all these were unimportant. Marlena was there, almost in person.

  Beside the practiced movements of the suited man who introduced her, she looked small and awkward.

  I thought she’d be taller. And I expected her to... glow, or something. Have an aura. But at first glance, she could have been one of the women who walked home from the bus stop each night from work in the factories, in her cheap dress and scuffed sandals. Graying hair pulled back from a large-featured face. Narrow dark eyes that glared from behind glasses.

  Glasses. Nobody told me Marlena wore glasses. None of the photos showed glasses.

  “You knew them, didn’t you?” said Florence.

  “Alvarez was well known in the district,” I said distractedly. The glasses didn’t fit what I knew about her.

  The camera drew back to show Alvarez on the edge of a stage in a wide stadium, surrounded by a dark ocean of figures, almost engulfed in the spotlights.

  Why am I here? Her voice echoed tinnily from the computer’s inbuilt speaker. You invited me to speak about the things that are happening in my country. But you know already. Why do you need me to tell you again? You are the ones who make the choice to go on as you have, or to act on behalf of others less fortunate who cannot act.

  “It’s a real pity she’s not around today,” said Florence. She shook her head sadly and went back to sealing envelopes, dabbing them with a glue stick because they were cheap post office rejects on which the glue had long dried.

  I said that conscience is not enough, but it is a good start. Don’t let it stop there. You can go back to your comfortable homes after I finish talking, and you can forget what I say. Or you can think about it, but eventually you’ll return to your job and your home and you’ll forget. Or you can go home and do something. A small action is enough. But it must be an act.

  She paused, removed the glasses, and smiled. It transformed her heavy features into beauty.

  Then do it again tomorrow.

  The speech was the same as I’d read in our history files, but it worried me that none of the contemporary reports mentioned my great-grandmother’s stories, like Marlena talking to the army commander or the decoy village. There were other stories, less glamorous: how she stopped the dam work, yes, but mainly because she invited the media into her village, and the media told the world about the dam.

  The media told the world about Alvarez, too. Now that I was here in the twenty-first century and saw the distortions in print and electronic media, I began to wonder how much we could trust of what they’d told the world about Alvarez.

  In the tent after Will, Grace, and Levin left, I sifted through the flimsy pages that Levin had rearranged. Interviews, articles, news stories, later reviews of earlier articles. The big issue of a magazine called Time published on the first anniversary of Marlena’s death, which I found by chance in a box at the dump when I was looking for wires. A lucky chance, because people usually sold old papers for recycling.

  One of the interviews I’d printed from the infonet caught my eye. Alvarez had refused to cooperate with the new alliance government when it came to power in 2016, because it hunted down the militias who had terrorized the people of that region for decades and executed them without trial. “This is not the way to build a lasting peace,” said Marlena. “You must stop the killing sometime.”

  I smoothed the paper below the grainy photograph—she wore no glasses—and read the last lines. “You have to be flexible,” she said. “Things can change in ways you don’t expect.”

  Like aliens coming to visit.

  “I have never seen the wisdom,” continued Marlena in the interview, “in resisting what you feel is right for today, in order to do something that may be right tomorrow.”

  I patted the edges of the papers into line and slid them inside the string bag in which I usually carried food or small pieces of potentially useful junk. I hadn’t collected many new reports on Alvarez for weeks now. It seemed more important to complete the telescope and prepare to contact the Invidi when they arrived.

  After five months here, I’d worked out that Alvarez might not be the hero I’d thought; she was a moderately successful politician who had a keen sense of justice, tempered by awareness of the need for compromise. Not quite the freedom fighter extraordinaire of EarthSouth legend and my great-grandmother’s memories. Nor even the charismatic leader of my own imaginings.

  Realistic or not, though, my image of Alvarez had helped me through the ordeal of the Seouras blockade—cause enough for gratitude. And she would help generations of campaigners for planetary justice in the decades after the Invidi come.

  I stepped out of the thin trousers and draped them over the back of the chair. Wash them tomorrow. Having to remind myself to do it was almost as arduous as the task itself. And hang them inside, I added silently. The day before yesterday somebody stole my other T-shirt and two pairs of underpants off the line in our courtyard. I couldn’t afford to lose any more.

  Four

  In the dream I fall into the Earth. The blue and white ball rises, becomes a curved line, then a horizon, then finally fills my vision completely. It’s different from the Earth of my century. The clouds are undisturbed by balloonlike weather controllers, there aren’t enough comsats to make navigation difficult, and no big orbital stations. No wide, brown kelp farms in the oceans. Blue below, blue above. Nobody yells at me through a comm link for unauthorized entry, no Earth-Fleet fighters buzz my little pod in rude swoops.

  Somewhere from beyond the dream come the niggling questions: Why wasn’t I being shaken to the eyeballs or squeezed nearly senseless against the harness or hearing the whine and rattle of stressed systems and the sizzle of the pod’s skin being fried? Shouldn’t I be terrified and sweating and repeating the reentry protocols aloud to keep conscious?

  What really happened was that the pod I took from the moon to Earth yawed and cracked across the structurals on one side and the paratube saved me with a jerk, holding me firm in midair as the pod fell away in pieces toward a black mass, then I landed with a clumsy thud onto soft dirt in the dark.

  I know this, but in the dream the pod plummets toward the blue and I can’t stop it. Earth starts falling away from me again. Shrinks, falls in upon itself as if someone has placed a black hole in the middle of the blue, and then it finally disappears. I drop into that point. You can’t breathe in a black hole. Gravity crushes your lungs. Can’t breathe...

  Can’t...

  I pushed myself upright, hand fumbling automatically for the inhaler beside the bed. Not there... Horrible feeling, as though the air intake on an environmental suit had failed. Gasping for air that wouldn’t come... Don’t panic... my fingers found the inhaler and I shoved my face into it and sucked desperately. The chemicals took effect immediately. One breath in, one breath out. Easy.

  I sat still, c
overed in sweat, and waited for the trembling to stop and my chest to lose that tight and trampled-on feeling. Prompted by the dream, my mind played through the scenes of my arrival, as if by revisiting them, I might find something I hadn’t noticed before. Some clue as to what went wrong.

  The ship I was testing, Calypso II, came through a jump point about three days’ travel from Earth. With my twenty-second-century engines, that is. Using this century’s pre-Invidi technology the same distance would have taken more than a year, which is about how long the original Calypso would have taken to reach this position.

  The original Calypso left Earth on what its passengers thought was a journey to Alpha Centauri in 2026, and would have taken a year to get to the position in space where I’d emerged. So I thought I’d arrived in 2027. This was because the distance from Earth indicated that the jump I just completed had a “length” of ninety-five years, 2027 to 2122.

  Calypso II seemed to hold together well, so after checking all systems I tried to go back through the jump point to my own time by repeating what I’d done when I piloted the ship toward the coordinates near Jocasta where Calypso had appeared.

  It didn’t work. I took a deep breath, let it out. I’d never used a jump drive before, this was only to be expected. Maybe I missed something. I checked the log, tried again. Didn’t work. Calypso II continued in flatspace as though the jump point didn’t exist.

  I started to sweat. Ran a series of exhaustive diagnostics. Nothing mechanical at fault. Nothing in the navigational or control systems. But I couldn’t get back through the jump point that should be there. Calypso II was on a short experimental flight, and my supplies weren’t sufficient for more than a fortnight’s emergency running. I also didn’t have much fuel for flatspace thrusters. I could reach Earth—probably.

  If I couldn’t find the problem by the end of the fortnight I had two choices. First, I could do some fancy conversion work and divert energy from the flatspace engines to life-support systems, then sit around for months hoping someone from my own time would arrive with a rescue ship. Unfortunately, but necessarily, nobody knew that we’d been experimenting with a jump drive, and therefore just about everyone would think I had merely disappeared into normal space. And if the rescue mission didn’t arrive, I’d have sacrificed my ability to move for no reason. In this century there was little space traffic near the solar system. The likelihood of my distress call being picked up by a passing trader was close to nil.

  Second, I could recalibrate the flatspace thrusters and go to Earth. In 2027 the Invidi would have been here for four years. They’d have organized orbital stations, surely, so that they didn’t have to live on Earth among humans. I wasn’t entirely sure of the details of intra-system exploration in this age; I did know the first crewed expeditions to Mars didn’t leave until the 2040s.

  If I contacted the Invidi, they’d understand what had happened and hopefully help me to get back. They wouldn’t know about the future ban on humans using jump technology. I wasn’t sure whether my contacting them would give them information from the future, but hell, from what I understood of the timeline, all that had happened already.

  So I headed for Earth with my twenty-second-century signal dispersal field operative, in the hope that I wouldn’t show up on any human sensors. The Invidi hadn’t given humans any engineering information or hardware at first, so human sensors should still be pretty primitive. I’d stretched the emergency running time to nearly three weeks by shutting off every inessential system and consuming as few resources as possible, so by then I was dirty, hungry, sleep-deprived, and thoroughly frustrated.

  But the closer I got to Earth the worse I felt. There was no sign of Invidi presence. No ship signals, no residue from any kind of spaceship engine I was familiar with, no alien comm traffic. Only human signals, mostly on the same narrow band of frequencies and all of them on Earth, except for a robot probe gathering samples on Titan. When I reached the moon, being careful to keep on the dark side, I stopped and listened more carefully to the signals.

  And it was there, huddled in my dark, foul-smelling, stale-aired cabin that had become a prison, exhausted, confused, and scared, that I learned I was in the wrong time. But this is impossible, I told myself, trying not to speak out loud to conserve oxygen, but by that time often it wasn’t clear in my head if I spoke or not. News report after news report, entertainment program after program—what a lot of them—military communiqué after communiqué, all repeated the same unbelievable date.

  This is your Moscow correspondent, bringing you the news on January 4, 2023.

  Here’s the weather, then, for Wednesday, fourth of January, 2023.

  Kickin’ in with the best quiz on the globe, this fine Tuesday evening, 3 January 2023.

  I could understand the English, Spanish, and a little of the German—from my great-grandmother—and had to assume the other languages carried the same message. I was four years too early. The Invidi hadn’t arrived yet.

  Which is impossible.

  I floated in the middle of the cabin and squeezed my eyes shut to keep out the sight of what might become my coffin. Don’t panic, think.

  Calypso left Earth in flatspace in 2026 and came out of a jump point at Jocasta in 2122. Six months later, I go back through that point and emerge at the coordinates Calypso must have left from. The distance from Earth to those coordinates indicated Calypso must have reached there and entered the jump point in 2027. Which means the jump should have been ninety-five years long. But I had emerged at the coordinates in 2023... 2023, oh, gods... which makes a length of ninety-nine years between now and my time of 2122.

  No jump we know changes length. They are always fixed in space—invisible until activated, but always in the same spot—and always have the same length, or “correspondence.” Otherwise what would be the point of having a jump network? That’s how the Confederacy maintains order, by keeping all member worlds on the same timeline.

  Yet not only had Calypso used a jump point that was not connected to the Confederacy’s Central jump network, but it seemed to have shifted back in time.

  What the hell should I do?

  In the end, I kept my original plan, prompted by the date. The only way I could find out if the jump point was still connected to my world of 2122 was to either repair my jump drive myself or ask the Invidi. As I couldn’t do the former, I’d have to wait for the Invidi to arrive. And the Invidi arrived on Earth in May 2023. May 1, to be exact. All I had to do was survive five months on my own planet.

  If I’d known what that involved, maybe I would have stayed in Calypso II and tried to stretch and convert my fuel for five months.

  But I didn’t, I left Calypso II tethered in a deep crater on the dark side of the moon and took one of the escape pods down to the planet.

  The Single Escape Vehicle was popularly known as a “turd” because of their simple shape and the fact that if you needed to use one, you were deep in it. This one lived up to its reputation by malfunctioning, then disintegrating at about seven kilometers above the surface, and I floated down in a damaged paratube that eventually caught in short, thorny bushes on a hillside and dumped me. Sand and small, sharp rocks made a mess of the environment suit’s insulation, so after I finished shaking with the release of tension, I buried it. All but the boots. The scattered remains of the pod I could do nothing about. I hoped it would be buried soon in drifting sand and dirt. I didn’t really care, I just sat there for a moment and contemplated how nice it was not to be dead. Then the cold seeped up from the sand, which grew harder and harder, and merely not being dead wasn’t enough. I had to find a town, somewhere to wait out the next five months until the Invidi came.

  I knew when I was, but where? The stars said the Southern Hemisphere, but I didn’t think it was my home continent. I didn’t get as far as the Indian Ocean. Which left Australia. Murdoch’s homeland.

  Might as well walk as sit here.

  The sun rose. I was in a landscape of straggly trees, sha
rp grasses, prickly-looking shrubs. Lots of unfamiliar birdsong, among it a peculiar gulping cry, and a liquid warble that made me glad just to hear it. A wire fence drooped to the ground unmended. This sign of human habitation heartened me and I followed the fence to a road. But there were no houses and no sources of water. I finished the pod’s emergency water rations too quickly.

  I kept walking along the side of the road. It didn’t look well maintained. The edges of the bitumen mix were crumbling and there were holes every ten or fifteen meters, some big enough to cover a quarter of the black surface.

  The heat reflected off the road became worse as the day dragged on. I kept my outer shirt over my head as radiation protection, but by midday my head was aching so much I had to stop and sit beside a bush. Mouth dry, eyes full of dust. Not one vehicle in about six hours. They’d had groundcars in this period, surely. If so, none of them traveled this road.

  A little later a hum in the distance became a growl, then a roar, and a long groundcar stopped with a hissing of brakes at my frantic waving. The driver waited for me to rattle open the cabin door. He glanced at me sideways from pale blue eyes with lines radiating from the corners. Suspicious and distant.

  “Long way from anywhere to be walking.”

  I nodded, unsure of twenty-first-century idioms. At least I understood his words. English.

  “Car break down? Or somebody dump you?”

  I nodded again. He gave me a drink of water, which I gulped down. The groundcar lurched into motion again. Unsettling at first, then soothing, the road rolled on endlessly, straight and gray, away from the sun. Eastern seaboard, I thought sleepily, population centers. From a photoimage above the window, a small dark woman hugging a young child smiled down at me. A dangling woven ball with a tassel rocked in front of them.

  I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, the vehicle was stationary, the driver outside talking to an other man. Dark outside, except for lights on poles beside the road and bright lights over a low building beside it. The driver said I’d better get out unless I wanted to go through a checkpoint.