Erasing Time (5 page)

He looked uncomfortable, which probably meant yes. “The government will decide. They control everything that affects Traventon.”

“Everything? What happened to democracy?”

She had asked the question rhetorically. He didn’t answer it that way.

“Democracies didn’t last long after your time. It was too hard for average people to make decisions about policies. So now the government educates a select group of people and appoints them to positions.” He tilted his head at her, questioningly. “You must have seen it happening. Democracy was already declining during your time.”

Sheridan wanted to protest this fact but couldn’t. She didn’t know enough about Congress or the democratic process to tell whether it had been in decline. Which, she realized, might be proof Echo was right.

It couldn’t be good that democracy was gone. In fact, it could be very bad.

She felt a prickle of fear, and with it an urgent desire to see her sister. Sheridan got off the bed. “Can we see Taylor now?”

“If that’s what you want.” Echo stood, took Sheridan’s hand, and led her to the door. Perhaps it was customary in this society to hold hands, or perhaps he was afraid she’d run away. Whatever the reason, she was glad for the warmth of his fingers intertwined with hers. It made her feel more secure in this strange place.

They left the room and went down the white hallway. Sheridan’s footsteps made a tapping noise against the floor, like a gavel slowly pronouncing a judgment. She wondered how long it would take until everything stopped feeling so surreal, like it was happening to someone else.

She sneaked a glance at Echo’s profile. He was tall, handsome, and holding her hand. Definitely surreal.

If he had gone to her high school, what type of person would he have been? Her first thought was: one of the popular jocks, the kind of guy cheerleaders doted on. But the underlying seriousness in Echo’s eyes wouldn’t let her pin him to that group and leave him there, mindlessly enjoying his adulations.

He had stepped in front of her when the black-clad men had pointed weapons at her. He’d said he would do what he could to protect her—and he didn’t even know her.

Echo caught her looking at him, but she didn’t turn away like she normally would have. “When you said you’d protect me, who did you mean from?”

“Anyone you need protecting from.” He gave her a smile, and it felt like a prize. “Did you have someone in mind already?”

“Yes. Everyone who totes around needles.”

He ran his thumb across the back of her hand. “You’ll be fine now. No need for more needles.”

She was a long way from fine but didn’t say so.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “There’s a foodmart here in the Scicenter.”

Sheridan shook her head.

He gave her hand a squeeze. “The food isn’t bad here. A lot is similar to what you ate.”

“I don’t think I could eat anything right now.”

Echo looked at her for a few more moments—still studying her, she supposed. “They say people in your time kept animals to kill so they could eat their flesh.”

And apparently people in 2447 were strict vegetarians.

He was not going to understand the lure of pepperoni or cheeseburgers, or her personal favorite, bacon. She didn’t feel like she had the energy to explain protein needs to him, but lies didn’t sit easily on her tongue either.

She chose an answer that didn’t implicate her. “My family lived on an acre of land, and we had two horses.” She hadn’t thought to miss them until now, and it hit her with a stab of pain. Breeze and Bolt were gone too. “We also had a dog named Georgie. We never would have eaten any of them, though.” Georgie, however, had caused the death of a few stray sparrows, at least one mouse, and whatever it was they put in Alpo.

“Tell me,” Echo said, “how many animals from your time period talked?”

Sheridan’s gaze darted to his eyes to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. “None. Why would you think animals talked?”

“We have documentation—movies, pictures, stories—that show some animals spoke....” He let the sentence drift off, puzzled.

“Echo,” she said, “have you ever tried to talk to an animal?”

“Animals are extinct. The flesh eaters of your time killed them all.”

She stopped walking, and his hand pulled away from hers. “No. That can’t be right.”

“I would have liked to see them,” he said, stopping too. “We have programs with computer-generated animals in the Virtual Reality center, but it isn’t the same.”

Sheridan shook her head—short, quick denials. “People loved animals. We kept them for pets. And we couldn’t have killed
all
of them. We tried to get rid of mice and rats, and it was impossible.”

“They’re all gone,” Echo said. “Even the rats.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “You’re wrong. Just like you’re wrong about animals talking. They didn’t.”

His eyebrows drew together. “We have stories dating back thousands of years. Aesop’s fables. ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ ‘The Three Little Pigs.’ Your time period had Bugs Bunny, Winnie-the-Pooh—”

“Those are just children’s stories.”

“Yes, but adults told them to their children.” He cocked his head. “Do you expect me to believe that for generations, across human culture, parents routinely lied to their kids about the communication capabilities of animals?”

“Yes.”

He raised a disbelieving eyebrow.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Who would hire three pigs to work construction jobs? They couldn’t hold hammers with their little cloven hooves.” She let out a frustrated sigh. It was unbelievable, really, that she was standing here discussing pig careers. “Don’t you have any nature shows from our time period? Maybe a
National Geographic
magazine or two?”

Echo took hold of her hand and resumed guiding her down the hall as though it wasn’t worth arguing about. “Only the records that were transferred from silicon to holographic memory were preserved over the centuries. Unfortunately, most of your programming was destroyed during the information wars of the twenty-third century.”

“Information wars?”

“Attacks on computer systems. When a civilization’s internal neural network is destroyed, it’s easy to take over. That’s why information isn’t available to the public anymore. It’s too hard to defend. It’s lucky we salvaged anything from your time period.”

“Wait—what do you mean, information isn’t available anymore?”

He wasn’t listening, though. His pace slowed to a standstill and he let go of her hand. He looked at her as though the reason for her denials about animals speaking had suddenly become clear to him. “You were one of the flesh eaters, weren’t you?”

She nearly denied it. She didn’t want to give him the least bit of leverage in the argument. But he might ask Taylor about their eating habits, and then he would think Sheridan was a flesh eater and a liar as well.

She lifted her chin. “Believe whatever you want. Apparently that’s what you do regardless.” She set off down the hallway, even though she didn’t know where she was going. “If the animals are really gone, though, couldn’t your scientists have used the Time Strainer to bring some back instead of abducting random people?”

Echo let her walk a few steps, then took hold of her hand to stop her. He put his other hand on a button by a door, opening it, then led her inside.

Rows of computers and chairs filled the room. Taylor and Jeth sat in front of a computer watching something on the screen. Taylor looked up when they walked in, and relief swept over her face. She stood up and gave Sheridan a hug. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”

Sheridan returned the hug, then pulled away. “Taylor, tell the truth—did animals ever talk?”

“What?” Taylor stared at her, perhaps mentally revising her assessment of Sheridan’s health.

“Animals. Did they or didn’t they wear clothes and speak English?”

Taylor put her hand across Sheridan’s forehead, checking for signs of fever. “Uh … no.”

Sheridan turned to Echo and gave him a pointed look. “I told you so.”

He crossed his arms and walked over to where his father sat, as though standing there reinforced his position. “Two testimonies don’t erase the records.”

Taylor’s gaze slid back and forth between Sheridan and Echo. “What records?”

“‘Little Red Riding Hood,’” Sheridan said, “and
Winnie-the-Pooh
.”

Jeth leaned back in his chair, considering this. “Perhaps by your period in history, animals chose silence as a sort of resistance.”

Taylor held her hand up to interrupt the conversation. “Hello—animals don’t talk now, do they?”

“No animals are left,” Echo said. “The people of your generation ate them.”

Sheridan wrinkled her nose. “Like I would eat a rat.”

Taylor went back to her chair and sat down. “If all animals were extinct, the earth’s ecosystems would have crashed to the point that they couldn’t sustain human life.”

“The ecosystems did crash,” Echo said. “That’s why people live in enclosed cities now—to protect the Agrocenters.”

“And pollination happens how?” Taylor asked.

“Done by pollenbots. Miniature droids.”

“Right,” Taylor said, in the tone she used when she’d decided someone was so delusional there was no point arguing with them. Jeth and Echo didn’t know the tone, but Sheridan did and it gave her hope. As long as Taylor doubted Echo’s explanation, it wasn’t necessarily true.

“How was food produced in your day?” Jeth asked, leaving the subject of the animals’ demise behind.

“I don’t know much about it,” Taylor said. She ran her hand through her hair wearily. “Look, is there—”

Taylor didn’t finish. Both Echo and Jeth were glancing about the room with puzzled expressions.

“It’s a saying,” Taylor said, and her voice sounded tight. “It means, ‘Listen.’”

“
Look
means
listen
?” Jeth’s eyebrows furrowed together with obvious skepticism.

“Listen,” Taylor said slowly, “where are Sheridan and I going to stay?”

Jeth stood up from his chair, stretching. His maroon hair swayed across his shoulders. “I suppose it’s time we talked to the scientists about your accommodations.” He motioned to Echo. “It’s better to ask in person.” Then the two of them walked toward the door.

“Don’t leave this room,” Jeth called over his shoulder. “The scientists wouldn’t like you wandering the building unescorted.”

Sheridan didn’t care what the scientists liked. Perhaps this was evident in her expression. Echo looked at her and added, “The Enforcers wouldn’t like it either.”

Jeth and Echo walked toward Lab Fifteen. Echo waited for his father to say something about the girls being identical twins—the coincidence of it, or the irony. Jeth didn’t. Was it possible his father hadn’t noticed? Echo decided not to ask. The subject would lead to his brother.

“Taylor and Sheridan are quite beautiful,” Jeth said. “I had expected girls from that era to look sickly and weak, malnourished from a constant diet of sugar and fat.”

“Historians must be wrong about their diet.” Echo didn’t say more about their eating habits.

“I suppose we’ll find we’ve miscalculated lots of things,” Jeth said. “I expected the girls to be happy to be here, away from the anarchy and danger of their time. Instead they’re quite unplugged about it.” Jeth mulled this over. “I guess the unknown is always feared.”

“They have a different way of thinking about things. It might be hard for them to understand our culture.” Echo was midway through this sentence when he realized the mistake he and Jeth had just made.

They hadn’t been thinking of the twenty-first-century culture when they left the girls alone in the Infolab. Back in the early twenty-first century, people didn’t have crystals implanted in their wrists. They could move around freely without being tracked. The girls were upset about being brought here, and in all probability they had bolted from the room as soon as Jeth and Echo turned the first corner.

“Sangre,”
Echo swore softly under his breath. At this very moment Sheridan and Taylor were probably wandering around somewhere, untraceable because they had no crystals, trying to … but what
would
they try to do?

They couldn’t understand the language, had nowhere to go and no way to even activate food dispensers.

And if the wrong people found them …

Echo stopped in the hallway. “We should go back and make sure the girls haven’t escaped.”

“Escaped?” Jeth said the word with disdain. “Where would they escape to?”

“Nowhere, but they don’t know that. They don’t understand our society.”

Jeth and Echo had reached the elevator, and Jeth pushed the button. “I didn’t find them stupid. In fact, I was surprised at Taylor’s intelligence. She learned the computer functions after seeing me do them only once.”

Echo didn’t move toward the elevator. “I never said they were stupid. I said they didn’t understand.” The elevator door opened. Echo remained where he was. “I’m going back.”

Jeth stepped into the elevator and waited for Echo to follow. “They ought to have time alone. If one of us stays to guard them, they’ll feel like prisoners. It’s better to let them know we trust them.”