Fountane Of

Fountane Of

Copyright © 2010 by Doranna Durgin

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously--and any resemblance to actual persons, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

License Notes:

This efiction is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This efiction may not be re-sold or given to others. If you would like to share, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this efiction and it was not purchased for your use, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank you for helping the e-reading community to grow!

The Author Note:

This story was first published in
HelixSF
, edited by William Sanders. It's not typical of my work in either length or subject matter, but is one of those ideas that struck hard way back when--I can still remember the moment!--so all in all I was doubly glad to find a home for it. This is a slightly different version--I do love to fiddle!--but only with regard to a bit of buff and polish.

I hope you enjoy!

~Doranna

http://doranna.net

Finding the Other ~ Facing the Other

Loving the Other

Fountane Of

I'm not dead!

Augie laughed. Right out loud, breaking the silence of the gleaming black walls and their deep nighttime shadows. Loud and long and just possibly tinged with both hysteria and relief.
I'm not dead!

All those years of propaganda and rules, turned to lies in a single bold moment.

The sudden voice of caution startled him to silence. It wasn't safe to hang around, not here in the deep night of the future. Only a couple of hours, but still...

Here in the forbidden Forward.

Boldness struck again. It didn't matter if anyone saw him here--they'd get no more than a glimpse before he hit his recall switch, and then they'd assume he'd come from their future, that he'd come
Back
.

For no one ever went Forward. To go Forward was supposedly fatal; to
try
to go Forward merited swift, severe punishment. The asswipe Historians were sworn and trained and--Augie suspected--brainwashed against it. So were those brown-nosing Techs. And of course the Supervisors. But...

Augie looked around the clean, dark lines of the pedestal-studded Ops room until his gaze landed on the battered suction mop against the wall, the autosweeper and its portable control panel. His mop. His sweeper.

The janitor who'd gone Forward.

He went Forward not just once, but repeatedly.

Still not dead.

First those few bold hours...then days. He wandered away from the travel pedestal, creeping around the closed Historical Research Center Ops with impunity. He came to realize that the person most likely to spot him was...him.

Weeks into his adventure, he looked forward to the nightly trip. Early evening found him smiling to himself as he prodded the simple interface of the autosweeper.

"Augie, will you come to my office?"

Shit. Supervisor Tolan. And she looked grim. Surely she didn't--

No. If she knew, he'd have been snatched up by security and marched off to a sterile, isolated cell for rough questioning--and a brain-wipe. If they did know Forward travel wasn't fatal, they damn sure didn't want anyone doing it--or they wouldn't have spread all those lies about it.

But even if she just suspected...

Augie pasted a subservient smile on his face, made sure the autosweeper was tucked out everyone's way, and rued those two hours where Tolan's shift overlapped his. "Ma'am?" he said, following her to her office on the second floor, hesitating in the doorway there.

"Come in, Augie," she said, gesturing absently while she studied her hand pad, directing it through several pages of text. She didn't bother to tip the screen for privacy. When she looked up at him, he couldn't read her expression. Sadness? Resignation? From that scowling up-tight supervisor?

She knows. She knows--

"I'm disappointed," Tolan said. "I had hoped you would take advantage of our LitEd. Not many jobs offer that benefit."

LitEd? What the hell?
Augie could only stare at her. She turned away from him, looking out the huge steel-plas window that gave her a view of the entire travel floor. Peds studded the circumference like the numbers on a clock, some of the manned, some empty. As Augie followed her gaze, one of the Historians flickered out of view and the ped drained of its sleek, glossy maroon color, turning matte grey while it waited for recall.

No, she didn't know. She'd called him for a lecture on LitEd. As if he needed extra schooling, with what he'd accomplished on his own.

"So many people depend on easy interfaces these days," Tolan said, not yet turning back to look at him. Perfect view of her uptight knot of hair, her uptight little ass in a tailor-faux skirt. She nodded at the floor below. "They depend on machines that do the thinking for them. Even our Historians, although they'd deny it." She turned her head just enough so he could see an unexpected twist of her lips. Something rueful.

But by the time she turned all the way around, it was gone. Her familiar
I'm your superior
face returned. "If you applied yourself to these classes, Augie, I know you could qualify for advancement. You're persistent in your problem-solving, and resourceful."

"But that doesn't count for anything without LitEd," Augie said, far more bitterly than he meant to.

It took her by surprise, but she smoothed it over. "Completing a LitEd class demonstrates more than your ability with the written language, Augie. It shows us the level of your commitment."

He barely stopped himself from laughing out loud.
If only she knew!
"I understand," he said. "I'll think about it."

It was what she wanted to hear. She handed him a course reg card. "Next opportunity, then," she said, and expected him to close the door behind him without being told.

He did.

Come the quiet hours, when Augie finally went Forward, he wandered over to the central raised platform where Supervisor Tolan oversaw Ops, staring down into that temporarily abandoned space. Historians...they were so full of themselves, full of their privileges and their schooling and their knowledge. Half the planet's population skipped basic Lit--who cared if he was among them? It didn't mean he deserved less respect than any self-important Historian.

When the day came--the day he brought back the future and turned it into the present--they'd understand. The day he changed baseline forever. He grinned into the darkness, lips a disdainful curl. "You just wait," he told the nighttime emptiness.

For years Augie had watched the Historians--resentful, coveting. He watched them and plotted...he watched them and planned.

He'd realized long ago that the Historians never saw him at all.

He'd swiped a chip manual on trav ped maintenance. He'd paid someone to read him the future lock specs. He'd snagged the right tools, and he'd used a week of night shifts to get the damn F-lock disabled. All that, he'd managed.

Without
their fancy extra schooling.

And now, Augie the Janitor Who went Forward and Didn't Die had his rounds to finish, back in his own time line.

The palm-sized recall unit fit so right in his hand, the contours inviting the curl of his fingers.
Like it was meant to be there.
He gave the silent room a sudden hard smile, and thumbed the recall switch.
I'll be back.

Another trip forward, another...he ventured out of the building. He learned the future. Still alive, still outwitting them all.

And now he shifted impatiently, stuck in a future pedestrian traffic jam. Traffic monitors watched the crowds from high-mounted platforms, as eager to ticket as the meter maids Augie's mother had once mentioned.

Dead now, she'd be. Dead for years.

Advertisements flickered around him, mid-air projections from he couldn't tell where. Most of them seemed to be hawking birth control products. No words, only sound and images. They'd finally gotten smart about that.

Bodies pressed in close around Augie; ahead, someone snarled at someone who jostled someone else who took offense and clobbered someone else...suddenly everything came to a standstill around a boiling froth of people. Augie slipped sideways, breaking line, leaving a ripple of oaths behind him as he found the side of a building and skimmed alongside the ancient brick.

That's when he heard the voice.

"Youth pills!"

He followed the sound to a doorway; a kid looked back at him. "Hey, mister--want youth pills?"

Augie looked at the teenager and his proffered bottle, at the bulge of more bottles in his black apron and at its indecipherable script of a logo.
"
Jack's Place," the kid said, startling Augie with the casual way in which he said it. As if the kid--this society--took it for granted that he couldn't read. No big deal.

The kid held out the bottle again, an impatient gesture. "Jackie K, you know?" he said. "Heya, you know someone elder? Take 'em while they're still legal."

"Youth pills?" Augie looked out into the crowd, at the preponderance of older people there, and he jerked his chin at them. "Why aren't they taking 'em, you giving them out free?"

"Moralists," said the kid, adding a little sneer. His eyes looked old.
How old?
Augie suddenly wondered, as his hand closed slowly around the bottle. "Painless," the kid offered, trying to read Augie's hesitation.

Youth pills.
What could be better than that? He only needed a few--one for himself, one for his mother, one to analyze. And then he'd have all he needed to make his fortune. To walk away from the Historians and their airs. He tried to swallow his excitement. "Enough in there for two?"

The kid grinned, too, as if Augie had passed some sort of initiation, become part of a secret. He nodded. "Three, even. We ought to have done this years ago, giving 'em out like this. Gotten people used to it, before the politics stepped in. It worked for the cloners. Just prepare yourself and take 'em, nothing fancy."

And Augie nodded like he knew, but he didn't even wait for the kid to look away. He thumbed the recall switch and returned to the sterile implacability of the night-time travel room.

The janitor who went Forward and lived.

The janitor who
changed the world.

He'd done something no one else could or would--because of who he was, and not what he'd bothered to cram into his brain. God-bloody-damned
youth pills
!

The kid in the apron would get his wish, all right--people would be long accustomed to these pills by the time he was born. Youth pills for everyone!

But not before Augie. For once, Augie would be first.

At home, he transferred the pill for his mother into a small self-sealer, laboriously copying the simple directions--for his mother had been through LitEd. She even owned books. But her disappointment with a son who hadn't followed her example would evaporate once she realized the tremendous import of what he'd done--of what he'd given her.

He let himself into her closet of an apartment--just two floors down--and left the sealer on her bed, recording a short explanation at her message center.
To make you young again.
He wished he had more words, a way to make it sound important. Until now, the everyday words he knew had always seemed enough.

He went back upstairs to stare at his own dose. There should be more fanfare, he thought. More recognition of the moment. If nothing else, he should be in Tolan's office, watching the look on her face as she realized--