Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1 Page 20

  The woman had morphed again. Two weeks before, Tiffany had spied her briefly at a table in the far corner: a cowgirl in faded jeans, checked shirt, and an honest-to-goodness Stetson. The following week, she’d gone for a tight red-and-black sweater and a clinking load of Native American jewelry: amulets, pendant, beaded earrings—the works. Now, she was a shivery-looking summer girl in a short, sleeveless sundress, sandals, and a broad-brimmed straw hat, dripping around the edges. What on earth inspired her to wear that? Tiffany wondered. Didn’t she hear the forecast? But at least she’d finally gotten the tan right; her skin looked as though she’d spent the past week in Acapulco. From her attire, maybe she thought she was still there.

  Brenda was talking basketball; the playoffs were looming and the team was in big trouble. Brenda was a huge fan, so it was easy for Tiffany to nod in the right places while continuing to watch the drama playing out around her. The former Goth wasn’t halfway through the coffee line by the time the solo student decided to call it quits. Once he’d made up his mind, he wasn’t one to waste time. In a series of rapid moves, he stuffed away his textbook, shoved back his chair, shrugged into his coat, and headed for the exit.

  The Goth-in-a-sundress reacted nearly as quickly. She peeled out of the coffee line and was in pursuit practically before the door had swung shut behind him.

  Tiffany’s curiosity was at the breaking point. She pushed back her own chair, barely remembering to grab her raincoat. “ ‘Scuse me,” she said to a startled Brenda. “I’ll be right back.”

  She scampered for the exit, then followed at a discreet distance, pretending to be looking for her car. But she needn’t have worried; the Goth had eyes only for the anatomy student. He was headed for the bus shelter, and as he rounded the corner of the building, the Goth picked up her pace. The student never noticed. Despite the rain, he’d pulled out a stack of index cards and was flipping through them as metronomically as earlier he’d been flipping his pen. The gesture looked angry, and he was cycling through cards so rapidly Tiffany doubted he was learning much. The Goth was totally focused on the student and neither of them noticed Tiffany, who stayed well behind, slightly off to one side so that if they did look back they might not realize she was following.

  What a weird pair, she thought. She hasn’t a chance with him, but she acts as though everything’s under control.

  Then suddenly, everything changed. The bus stop was three blocks away, across a park-and-ride lot that had long ago filled with cars and emptied of people. Midway across, the chiropractor altered course to angle between two large vehicles. Even as Tiffany remembered how an earlier student had disappeared behind a van and never emerged, the former Goth reached into her purse—a voluminous string handbag that could have held all of the anatomy student’s books and notebooks with room to spare—and extracted a pistol-shaped object with a fat handgrip and a bulbous barrel.

  Tiffany had never thought of herself as brave. But now she found herself sprinting toward the weapon without conscious thought. “Look out!” she shouted as the Goth belatedly heard her footsteps. “She’s got a—” Only it wasn’t a gun, it was some kind of electronic gadget with blinking lights and buttons, like a home-theater buff’s fantasy remote control mated to a miniature bullhorn.

  Whatever it was, Tiffany never managed to complete her warning. The world pulsed, then vanished, and she felt herself dropping into an endless void. She tried to scream, but there was either no air for screaming, or nothing to carry the sound, or maybe she was already unconscious and hadn’t quite figured it out.

  Then awareness vanished as well, and even the nothingness winked out.

  She awoke to sound emanating from blackness.

  “It’s not my fault,” a female voice was saying. The accent was odd, but the language was English, and even in the blackness, Tiffany knew it had to be the Goth. “She just appeared from nowhere and tried to grab the ‘sporter.”

  An older voice, also female, interjected. “Don’t give me excuses. You got lazy. According to the log that’s the fourth time you hit that loc’ after you and Stacyn went there tandem.”

  “Lazy?!” The Goth’s voice was indignant. “I’ve never worked harder in my life! Between all those snatches and the processing, I’ve barely had time to sleep.”

  “Okay, not lazy—greedy. Greedy, arrogant, and stupid. Stacyn was smart enough not to go back, but you kept it up, again and again. How stupid can you get?”

  “Stacyn’s a wimp.” Beneath the indignation, the voice carried an undercurrent of deeper frustration. “The loc’ was perfect. All those prospects go there week after week. The place is loaded with them!”

  “Not to mention all the other regulars. What, did you think your ‘guise was so perfect nobody could ever see through it? Look at this fem.” Something that felt uncomfortably like a shoe nudged Tiffany in the ribs. “If she’s the norm, you really glommed the wrong dress code. I should put you on probation for the rest of your life. Hell, I should make sure you never get into the field again, ever.”

  The Goth voice dropped both the frustration and the indignation. “But I got you five snatches! Six, if you count the one Stacyn nabbed. I bet some are already out of the Bubble, right?” There was a vague sound that must have been assent because her voice gained confidence. “And whose idea was it to sim’ the chro-warp on grad students?” A pause. “Well, Stacyn helped with the math, but the idea was mine. It was brilliant, and you know it.”

  “I never said it wasn’t.” The older voice had become too calm, reminding Tiffany of the worst scoldings she’d received during a short-lived bad-girl episode in grade school.

  “Damn right,” the Goth said, oblivious to the danger. “And it worked. There’s been almost no warp on any of the snatches. The college just admits more students and by the time the warp gets to us, it’s negligible.”

  There was a long pause, probably accompanied by the steeliest of supervisor’s glares. “Maybe I should do the same with you,” the older woman eventually said. “Hunters aren’t irreplaceable, either.”

  “You wouldn’t?” This time it was definitely a question. “There were eight good prospects back there, and I’d have had them all if this bitch hadn’t shown up.” Tiffany felt another nudge in the ribs, much less gentle. “If it weren’t for her, you’d be giving me a bonus.”

  The older voice sighed theatrically. “No. Stupid is still stupid, even when it’s also lucky. You were lucky, Dannette, that this temp wasn’t a cop with a gun. Lucky that that low-field ‘sporter didn’t just get half of her. Think of the chro-warp mess that would have made. I guarantee you I wouldn’t have been the one who spent the next six months patching it.”

  The Goth attempted another comeback, but Tiffany was having trouble keeping up with the conversation. The world was finally returning to her—or more precisely, she was returning to it—and she was becoming aware of senses other than hearing.

  Pain was one of them. She was lying awkwardly on her side, on something cold and hard. It was smooth and dry, so apparently she was no longer in the parking lot. Her arms and legs were cramped, her shoulder and the point of her hip felt bruised, and an urgent pressure in her bladder suggested that she’d been unconscious long enough for the coffee to start doing its thing. Her head, too, was starting to throb, and she wished she hadn’t left her purse with Brenda, along with the bottle of ibuprofen it always contained.

  The thought of Brenda, waiting in the coffee shop, brought a different pang, and Tiffany decided it was time to see what she could do about getting back into action, preferably before that Dannette creature hauled off and kicked her good.

  The blackness was her first concern. Briefly, she wondered if she was blind. Then she found a simple solution: with effort, she summoned enough energy to open her eyes.

  The hard surface proved to be an institutional-tile floor: brick-red hexagons receding toward curving walls. She tried to turn her head, but her neck muscles weren’t yet hers to command. She could see en
ough, though, to tell that she was in a large, under-furnished room, somewhere on the spectrum between a yurt and a geodesic dome. The walls and portions of the ceiling she could see produced a mild, uniform glow from some hidden source of illumination. Or maybe they themselves were glowing.

  It was hard to figure out the scale of this structure because it was so empty, but the nearest wall seemed no more than forty or fifty feet away. Between her and it, the floor was scattered with debris: dirt, rocks, and melted-looking chunks of metal, strewn like jacks tossed by a giant hand.

  Two pairs of feet stood in front of her, one tanned, bare-legged, and shod in sandals, the other wearing iridescent green boots and matching stretch pants. With a renewed effort of will, Tiffany tried to turn toward the bodies attached to the feet—an action that magnified the throbbing in her head and sent stars pricking across her newly recovered vision. But her muscles now answered the call, and her head rotated enough to reveal two figures: the sun-dressed Goth, close to her, back turned, and the supervisor—another woman with the same triangular face and Afro-Eurasian features, but the coffee-au-lait complexion of the Goth’s one-time companion.

  Compared to the supervisor’s attire, even Dannette’s strangest outfit had been positively ordinary. Above the boots and the skin-tight fabric covering her calves, the supervisor’s jumpsuit bellied out in a collection of puffy ribs, like the compartments of an air mattress, running from knee to hip on the front, back, and sides. Higher up, the ribs were replaced by concentric circles—largest at the hip and bust, narrowest at the waist—the overall effect reminiscent of a set of children’s play rings stacked into an hourglass shape on a narrow spindle. But the piece de resistance was the hairdo: a medusa-headed array of foot-long dreadlocks sticking out at random angles under the influence of starch or static electricity or heaven alone knew what. If this was what passed here for a business power suit, no wonder Stacyn and Dannette hadn’t found it easy to pick up the subtleties of coffee-shop attire. The supervisor wore no makeup and was of indeterminate middle age. Her mouth was a pinched, narrow-lipped gash. All in all, not a sight to inspire confidence.

  Tiffany may have groaned, or perhaps it was the motion of her head that halted the conversation going on before her.

  “Ah,” said the supervisor, “Sleeping Beauty returns.” She gave her underling the full benefit of the medusa-head hairstyle. “Leave us, Dannette.” And then, ominously. “We’ll finish this another time.”

  Ten minutes later, Tiffany was beginning to feel at least semi-human. The supervisor, who’d merely said that her name was Tancy Ngawa—Dr. Tancy Ngawa—had shown her to an alcove in the yurt-dome wall. There, in a surprisingly ordinary bathroom, Tiffany answered the call of hours-old coffee, splashed water on her face, and tried to jolt her mind back into motion. Her headache was receding and felt more like a hangover than a concussion. She suspected that she was a simple pill away from having it disappear completely, but Dr. Ngawa hadn’t offered anything and Tiffany wasn’t about to ask. Other than the headache, she had a couple of scrapes but no major bruises, cuts, or broken bones. By the time she emerged from the bathroom, she was again a going concern.

  Dr. Ngawa did something to the wall, and it extruded a white table and two simple armchairs. The older woman seated herself in one of the chairs and waved Tiffany to the other. It looked no more comfortable than a cheap folding chair, but when Tiffany lowered herself into it, it conformed perfectly to her posterior. Curious, she pressed her hand against a corner of the seat as firmly as she could, but the material did not deform under the pressure. It felt neither warm nor cool, smooth nor coarse. Solid was the only descriptor that unambiguously applied.

  “Welcome to the twenty-fourth century,” Dr. Ngawa said, relieving Tiffany of having to ask the obvious question. Oddly, she didn’t feel surprised. Something very strange had happened to her, and time travel was as good an explanation as any.

  “Or maybe ‘not-so-welcome,’ ” Ngawa continued. “I’ll be honest. We don’t want you here any more than I’m sure you want to be here. But unlike some people”—Tiffany knew who that had to be—“I don’t blame it on you.”

  Tiffany said nothing. She had a million questions, but at the moment there didn’t seem to be much to say.

  A heartbeat later, Ngawa continued. “Although your presence poses certain, uh, problems, let me assure you that you will be well-treated. I don’t yet know what we’re going to do with you, but we’re not barbarians. We won’t take you out and shoot you, or anything like that.”

  It hadn’t crossed Tiffany’s mind that she might be in danger: an oversight that made the reassurance less than optimally reassuring. There’s nothing like being given a reprieve from a fate you never thought to worry about to make you wonder what else you might be overlooking. Tiffany decided it was time to take a more active role in the conversation: to demonstrate that she was a living, thinking human being.

  “So where is this?”

  Ngawa gave her a taste of the contempt she’d lavished on Dannette. “I thought I told you. You’re in the twenty-fourth century. February 8, 2327, to be precise. Roughly 1600 hours, local time.”

  Tiffany did her best to ignore the rebuke. “No, I mean where am I, physically? What’s this building? What happened to the chiropractic student and why did—” She started to say Dannette, but thought better of letting Ngawa know how much she’d overheard. “Your”—hunter wasn’t any better, and Goth was probably meaningless in this culture—“young woman . . . point that . . . thing at him?”

  Ngawa had a very world-weary sigh. “It’s complex,” she said, “and I don’t know how much you’ll be able to grasp.”

  Try me, Tiffany thought. If I could get As in applied economics, I can handle more than you think. But she merely folded her hands on her lap and waited. She may have spent an unpleasant year playing Bad Girl, but she’d put in a lot more time as Good Girl and knew the latter was the way to get results.

  Ngawa sighed again. “You’re in what we call the Bubble. Think of it as a temporal isolation ward where we put people while we figure out what to do with them. Here, you’re effectively out of the time stream, where your presence won’t cause . . . disturbances.

  “You’re here because Dannette was cocky—a shortcoming for which she will be disciplined. The device she was trying to use when you interrupted her was a temporal transporter. Normally, she would have used it first on her . . . quarry, then on herself. But when you jostled it, you must have defocused the confinement ring so that it brought all three of you at once, plus”—she frowned at the debris on the floor—“all this other junk.

  “As for why you’re here—our society is . . .” Ngawa had a disconcerting habit of pausing while she sought just the right words. Words, Tiffany suspected, that were calculated to convey no moreinformation than necessary. “. . . short of males. Badly so, in fact. The cause is a”—again the pause—“plague. One that depleted the male population by perhaps 99 percent. Maybe more. Statistics from that era are somewhat . . . lacking.” In addition to her too-precise choice of words, Ngawa was avoiding the slang she’d so lavishly tossed around in her dressing-down of Dannette. It came off as condescending: you’re too stupid to understand me unless I lay it out very, very carefully.

  “Our solution,” Ngawa continued, “has been to . . . import males from the past. I work for a company that uses this method to provide mates to the women of our era.”

  Tiffany was aghast. “You mean you abduct men from my time and sell them into slavery here?”

  Ngawa’s smile carried no more warmth than her sigh. “Hardly. We educate them. We find them work. We offer richer and fuller lives than anyone could possibly obtain in your paltry era. Some resist, but most come to appreciate it. You could think of us as a . . . a high-class dating service. We make desperate women very happy. And there are enough desperate women that the men usually have many options. Once they’ve been here a year or two, few complain.”

  Maybe they
just give up, Tiffany thought. Although with multitudes of women fawning over them, some might actually be happy. Ngawa’s clientele would have to be pretty desperate, though, to want Brenda’s frat-boy types. “So how do you make sure the men are . . .” It was Tiffany’s turn to grope for words. “. . . deserving of your clientele?”

  Ngawa waved a hand dismissively. The fingers were thin, tapered, and devoid of nail polish. “Oh, that’s easy. Once we’ve identified a prospect, we check him out in the archives. It’s truly amazing how many records your Internet left us: college transcripts, criminal proceedings, credit histories, vast stores of the most mundane e-mail. Of course, we usually take men when they’re young, before they’ve actually done most of what we see in our archives. But the potential is still there. We work under the presumption that if a man was destined to become what you would call a ‘good one,’ then he will do the same in our era. We’re rarely wrong.

  “And that brings us to your first question, about the Bubble. When we sna—bring people here, we’ve interrupted the lives they would have led. Before we built the Bubble, we had to be very careful who we chose to transport. And, after we brought them here, we just had to live with the chronological consequences—which, thankfully, were usually minor. History has a way of correcting itself. But with the Bubble, we don’t have to be quite so cautious. As long as a new arrival remains inside, we have time to figure out exactly how much disturbance his transport may have wrought and take corrective action to mitigate it.”

  “So, what about me?”

  “To be honest, you’re our first accidental transport. Well, we got a dog once, but that hardly counts. Bringing you here created considerable temporal strain—what we call chronological warping—and while you were asleep, I dispatched a field team to try to figure out what’s involved. Meanwhile, we’ll need to keep you in the Bubble.”

  “What if I want to leave?”

  “Sadly, you have no such choice. Even my staff cannot go Outside whenever they choose. Everyone involved in time travel accumulates some amount of chro-warp, and it’s more efficient to wait until an employee comes up for furlough and patch all of that warp then, rather than doing it piecemeal. I realize that’s not what you’d like to hear. Or how you’d like to spend the rest of your life.”