Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1 Page 22

  “So, I take it that here,” Tiffany laughed, “talking to the walls isn’t a sign of insanity.”

  Dannette laughed, and Tiffany realized that hard edges and all, Dannette reminded her very much of Brenda. “Here, that expression would be taken literally,” Dannette said, “and people wouldn’t have a clue what you meant. Though, the Outside does have real restaurants with real table servers.” Her smile faded. “In fact, bartending is one of the things men from your era often wind up doing. It’s a relatively easy skill to learn, and bars with male bartenders or restaurants with honest-to-goodness waiters are in high demand.”

  Tiffany took the opportunity to follow up on Dannette’s shift of tone. “Why did you become a hunter?”

  “Why not?” Her voice carried more than a hint of defensiveness.

  “I wasn’t criticizing. I’m just curious. I mean, you’re obviously brilliant, industrious—if I may say so, driven—and unless I miss my bet, ambitious. So why lock yourself away in here? Are you trying to snag a man of your own?”

  This time, Dannette’s laugh was bitter. “Hunters don’t get to sample the wares. Not that the wares are in a mood to be sampled by those ‘at pick ‘em.” She took a long draught of her beer, gazed at what was left, and ordered another. She swirled the remaining liquid in her glass and watched it spiral in amber vortex. “Snarf it,” she said at last. “Okay, I’ve never told anyone this, and if you tell anybody, I’ll, I’ll—I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’ll make sure you don’t like it.”

  “Cross my heart,” Tiffany said. Then grinned. “If that means anything today.”

  “It doesn’t, but I know it.” Dannette drained the remainder of her beer and stared accusingly at the wall, which had yet to deliver the follow-up. The wall remained a wall, and she looked back at Tiffany. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m a certified genius. IQ of I don’t know what. But my parents—oh gads, I wish someone had ‘sported my father off to the future when I was about two. Not that anyone would have had him. He was a math teacher until he got fired for flunking some gosh-awful fraction of his students. Ninety percent or something like that—I never really got the full story.” The second beer arrived and Dannette snatched it. “Nothing was ever good enough for him, and he treated me the same way he did his students. Worse, because I was his daughter and supposed to be outstanding.”

  Dannette drank half of her second beer in a single long pull. “Not exactly a unique story,” she said.

  Tiffany thought of Brenda and her succession of frat-boy hunks “No. It seems to be timeless.” She wondered if everyone is fated to dance to the tune of former traumas. Which brought a new thought: to what traumas was she herself dancing?

  “An old story,” Dannette agreed. “But damn, it hurts when it’s you.” She took another big swallow of beer and glanced at the wall. Started to order, then changed her mind. “Some people drown such things in alcohol. Me, I ran off to the Bubble, where the bastard doesn’t even know where I am unless someday I’m stupid enough to call him on the V-phone.” Another swig of beer. “Which I won’t be.” She looked again at the wall. “Oh, hell, sometimes drowning’s not all that bad.” She finished most of her second beer, then ordered a third. The alcohol was beginning to take effect, but her eyes burned as intensely as ever. “And look what happened when I got here,” she said. “I wound up working for his female counterpart.” She finished the second beer. “Ain’t that what you’d call ironic? The psychists . . . what did your people call them?”

  “Psychologists.”

  “That’s it.” Dannette’s voice was beginning to slur. “The psychologists would have a field day.” She stared into the empty glass. “I tell you, in twenty years, I’m going to run this place. That outfit I told you about in the future? That’s gonna be me.”

  Ten days later, Dannette suggested that they meet for coffee. Increasingly, these get-togethers felt like Tiffany’s weekly klatches with Brenda—a thought she ruthlessly suppressed. Sometime, she was going to have to come to grips with all of this denial, but there never seemed to be enough time.

  Food service in the Bubble was comprised mostly of food courts scattered at strategic intervals through the facility, which, as best Tiffany had been able to figure out, sprawled on several levels over the better part of a square mile.

  “It’s built a lot like the first moonbase,” Dannette said, bringing home to Tiffany the reality of how much was going on in the Outside she might never be able to visit.

  In addition to the food courts there were auto-service restaurants, such as the pub Tiffany and Dannette had previously visited. The most popular ones required reservations a week in advance, but the tiny alcove that served as a coffeehouse wasn’t one of those. “Don’t expect too much,” Dannette warned. “Your people made coffee into high art. Nothing today is up to that standard, even on the Outside. Here’s your chance to feel superior.”

  The beverage was better than food-court norms but nothing special. “Most of us would consider this to be pretty good,” Dannette said, “but I was beginning to get a taste for the difference between good and very good when Ngawa put me on patch duty. Now, I’m lucky to have anything better than instant.”

  The mention of Dannette’s demotion brought up a question Tiffany wasn’t sure she wanted to ask. “Speaking of patches and the Outside, how’s it going with getting me out of here? Is there any chance?”

  Dannette snorted. “I forget that you don’t know Ngawa like I do. She thinks I’m impulsive.” She paused. “And I have to concede I’ve given her reason for that. The month I accidentally nabbed you—have I ever apologized for that?” She hesitated again, and for a moment, Tiffany thought she might actually apologize rather than just talk around the edges of it. But that sort of thing wasn’t her forte. With a jolt, Tiffany realized that she was probably Dannette’s best friend. Dannette, of course, was the closest thing Tiffany had to a friend of any kind. Suddenly, she felt very, very far from home.

  The moment passed, and Dannette resumed her story. “The month I nabbed you, I was taking a lot of chances. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, trapped in those damn safe houses.” She shot a glance over her shoulder to ensure that they indeed had privacy. “In fact, I started thinking about it right after that night in the pub, when I told you about my father—well, not until I got over the hangover, but you get the idea. I thought I’d done such a great job of running away from him, but all I did was bring him along with me.” She tapped her temple. “Here. ‘Gotta be the best or you’re no good.’ Damn, what rot.”

  “That type of thing is hard to beat,” Tiffany said, thinking yet again of Brenda. Had her friend gone to her grave without ever reaching the same understanding?

  “Yeah.” Another pause while Dannette blew on her coffee. Cooling it, or just thinking? Gathering strength, it turned out: “And I know I never apologized. So here goes—” She sipped the coffee. Burned her tongue and muttered a curse.

  “It’s okay,” Tiffany said. “I know you didn’t intend to nab me.”

  The permission not to apologize proved to be the lubricant that allowed her to force out the words. “Yes, but it was my error, not yours.” Big pause, deep breath. “I’m sorry I did this to you.” More scalding coffee on what must be an already tender tongue. “I wish I’d said that a long time ago. But when you’re expected to be perfect, it’s hard to admit being wrong.”

  For several minutes they sat in silence. Then Dannette roused herself. “You should have been a psych counselor,” she said. “What did you do back . . . then?”

  “I was project manager for a bunch of engineers.”

  The old Dannette was returning, and she replied with the familiar snort. “Same difference,” she said, then laughed again. “Now there’s a weird expression. I’ve been really working on blending in better: studying my twenty-first century colloquialisms, working on my ‘guise—trying to catch the distinction between glamour and reality. Did you notice that I’m no longer dying my
skin?”

  Tiffany hadn’t, but now that Dannette pointed it out, Tiffany realized that her complexion no longer varied spectacularly from week to week. “You look good.”

  “Yeah, a few patch trips ago, I ran across an ad for tanning salons. Most people here don’t need them, but if you leave me in the Bubble for a few months without sunlight, I turn positively fungoid. So when I got back, I added some ultraviolet to my wall illumination. And gee, it worked a lot better than the dyes, though every time I turn it on, the wall feels obliged to warn me about skin cancer.”

  The banter dropped from her tone. “But I don’t care. If I ever do get back in the field, I don’t want to attract the attention of someone else like you.” She sucked her teeth. “I never finished answering your question, did I?”

  Tiffany shook her head. Though sometimes it was better to help with other people’s problems than to find out there were no solutions to your own.

  “I thought not. Well, I may be impulsive, but Ngawa’s the opposite. She analyzes everything to death, then still does the wrong thing. She only got the directorship because her father’s important, which is why she brandishes that Ph.D. like it’s some kind of weapon. Her degree is in robotics or something like that, which probably makes her a pretty good tech weenie—did I get that term right?”

  Tiffany nodded.

  “But it doesn’t mean she knows diddlysquat”—this time Dannette merely grinned—“about temperonics. Or management, for that matter. Me, I’d have zapped both you and that student back to your parking lot long before either of you woke up. Dare your folks to figure it out. Pretty safe, because after all, how could they? I even suggested it to Ngawa, but she just sent back that silly study team. If she’d done it my way, there’d have been some baffled people back in your era—yourself included—and some chro-warp, but we’ve patched worse. Hell, I’ve patched worse. But Ngawa’s got no guts, and she let the opportunity slip.”

  “And now?” Although Tiffany was afraid she knew the answer.

  “I never heard, but I’m sure the study team brought back a big fat report that she duly read, then filed. She’s a bean counter at heart—if she has a heart. And worse, you’ve proven useful. She’s never going to let you go.”

  Tiffany stared at the wall beside the booth, wishing she could ask for something stronger than coffee. It was her turn to get drunk. But with nothing available but coffee, overindulgence would mean wakefulness rather than oblivion.

  At a distant booth, someone was using the table as a videophone, and Tiffany wished she had someone, anyone, who’d care if she gave them a call. For some time, an idea had been nagging at the back of her mind—another piece of denial she’d been effectively suppressing—but as she watched the V-phone in action, the thought took sharper form.

  “How does that work?” she asked.

  “What, you mean nobody’s shown you?”

  Tiffany shook her head. “People use the V-phone to page me all the time, but I’ve never placed a call.”

  “Ohhh. You should have asked ages ago. It’s not hard. First, you have to summon up a ‘puter port.” She made an open-sesame gesture above the tabletop, and it faded into the familiar transparent window. “Then you pick the V-phone icon, and tell it who you want to call. When you’re done, you just put it back to sleep.” The computer window faded away. “Note that I never had to actually touch the icons. Pointing is enough. It works by inductance.” She leaned back from the table. “Now, you try. Any flat surface will work. It knows where you are, so the image is always right-side-up.”

  Dannette’s gesture had seemed simple, but when Tiffany attempted it, nothing happened. She tried again, more carefully, but still the table refused to acknowledge her.

  “That’s odd,” Dannette said. “You could order food and coffee just fine, so it’s not as though Ngawa forgot to enter you into the grid. And ‘puter access is a basic perk. Give me a moment; let’s see if we can figure this out.” She shifted to Tiffany’s side of the table so Tiffany could watch, and again opened a port. Moments later, she was deep in a database, playing the icons with all ten fingers as easily as Tiffany’s could work a keyboard.

  “Weird,” she said, a few minutes later. “You exist in the system, but only barely. Basically, you’re earning a salary—not at a very good grade level, by the way—and you’re free to spend it, although I gather you’re not doing so.”

  “What would I buy?” Tiffany asked. Dannette shot her a glance but for once said nothing. “What’s odd,” she said instead, “is that other than those super-basics, you simply don’t exist. There’s not even a locked-down file on you—at least not one I can find. I even did a new archive search on you, and you’re a blank, which should be impossible. Yeah, you’re loaded with unresolved chro-warp, but you were still born, and nothing can change that.

  “My guess is that Ngawa doesn’t want you browsing the public databases. Either that, or there’s some truly bizarre sideslip going on. In which case patching you should be a priority: nobody’s truly sure that sideslip can be contained forever. We’re still shooting in the dark when it comes to temporal theory, and anyone who claims to really understand it is a fool.”

  Dannette backed out of the archival files but didn’t close the port. “What was it you wanted, anyway?”

  Tiffany hesitated. Did she really want to do this? But the butterflies were already dancing in her stomach, and the answer to one question—unless it, too, had been erased—was merely a few icons away. She drew a deep breath, but it didn’t do much to calm the butterflies. “There was a guy,” she said. “I dated him a few times, and then he just vanished. I was mad as heck at the time, but I keep wondering whether he might have wound up here. Whether some hunter”—suddenly the word snatched seemed as harsh as the reality it described—“might have taken him.”

  Dannette twitched a finger at an icon, and the port segued to a new field of view. “Easy enough to find out.” She glanced at Tiffany with a look that carried the stirrings of something new, something that seemed remarkably like compassion. “If you really want to know.”

  Tiffany’s throat was a dry lump. “Let’s go for it,” she managed. She gave Dannette a name and a few dates, and watched her fingers fly in the air above the tabletop.

  “That him?” Dannette asked, and a tiny likeness of Randall sprouted from the tabletop.

  She gulped. “Yep.”

  Dannette pulled up a data file. “He was brought here in the early days of the Bubble,” she said. “Though he was nabbed from only a year before I tagged you.” No hesitations over word choice. Dannette really did prize directness.

  “So my guy was one of the first to be snatched?” The butterflies were back, and she tried to still them with a weak attempt at humor. “Kind of unlucky, wasn’t I?”

  Dannette was learning, but she missed the subtlety of that one. “Not as much of a coincidence as you think. Your city was one of our first test centers. In fact, we’re going to have to move on soon, before we deplete it.” Dannette flicked through a few more icons. “Here’s a contact number on the Outside. Do you want to give him a call?”

  The butterflies froze, along with Tiffany’s heart. “Is that a good idea?”

  “Can’t see why not. If Ngawa checks my phone log, I’ll just tell her you didn’t tell me why you wanted to speak to him. She’d have a cow, but she told me to help you adjust to life in the Bubble, and the V-phone is a standard privilege. So, want to give it a try?” More icon tapping. “He’s a couple of time zones away, where it’s late afternoon. As good a time to call as any.”

  Tiffany’s heart was now running full speed. “From here?”

  “Sure. I’ll privacy-screen it for you. Do you want me to leave?”

  “No, I think I might need the moral support.” Why was this so hard? “Can you watch and listen, but edit yourself out of the transmission?”

  “Piece of pie.”

  “Cake,” Tiffany said reflexively, then realized that Danne
tte had been making a deliberate attempt to lighten her spirits. One that had worked, at least a bit.

  Tiffany may have seen the V-phone in action many times, but its perfect images were one technological miracle she’d never be able to take for granted. When, moments later, Randall’s head and shoulders rose before her as large a life, she couldn’t shake the sense that he really was a solid presence, one she would swear she could touch if she hadn’t once tried that experiment and proven it didn’t work. It merely blocked part of the projection beam and put a death’s-head hole in the subject’s face—far too close to her one-time fears about Randall for her to try it now.

  “Randall Wilkins?” she asked. There was no doubt it was him—a bit fuller in the face, perhaps, with more gray at the temples, but the same powder-blue eyes, square jaw, and perfect teeth. Seeing him now, she felt again the gulf of her separation from all she once called home.

  Not only had she never really found time to grieve the loss of her old life, but she’d never fully resolved her feelings about Randall’s own disappearance. True, they’d never really been a couple, but the pundits were wrong: you can lose something you never truly had. She wondered what the archives had once showed for his future, and whether she’d played a role in it.

  “Yes,” he said cautiously. “Although nobody’s called me that for quite a while.” Randall didn’t volunteer his new name, and Tiffany didn’t want to know.

  In addition to changing names, he had adopted twenty-fourth century attire. Now, he was wearing a loose-fitting black tunic with no visible seams, topped by a kaleidoscopic kerchief worn jauntily around his neck. He’d opted for a deep-focus image, allowing Tiffany to see a well-appointed den, furnished with a real wood desk and upholstered armchairs rather than the Bubble’s ubiquitous white plastic. In the background, which the V-phone rendered in the washed-out pastels and blurred patterns of an Impressionistic painting, tall windows opened onto a manicured yard. Beyond, afternoon sun glinted off a sapphire lake flecked with spinnakered sailboats.