The Best of Michael Swanwick (55 page)

It looked ordinary enough. Ellie rubbed it, sniffed it, touched it gently to her tongue.

It tasted sour.

Sour, the way a small battery tasted if you touched your tongue to it. There was a faint trickle of electricity coming from the thing. It was clearly no ordinary key.

She pushed her glasses up on her forehead, held the thing to her eye, and squinted. It looked exactly like a common everyday key. Almost. It had no manufacturer’s name on it, and that was unexpected, given that the key looked new and unworn. The top part of it was covered with irregular geometric decorations.

Or
were
they decorations?

She looked up to see Nadine studying her steadily, unblinkingly, like a cat. “Nadine, honey, your eyes are younger than mine—would you take a look at this? Are those tiny…
switches
on this thing?”

“What?” Nadine accepted the key from her, examined it, poked at it with one nail.

Flash
.

When Ellie stopped blinking and could see again, one wall of their cell had disappeared.

Nadine stepped to the very edge of the cell, peering outward. A cold wind whipped bitter flakes of snow about her. “Look!” she cried. Then, when Ellie stood beside her to see what she saw, Nadine wrapped her arms about the older woman and stepped out into the abyss.

Ellie screamed.

***

The two women piloted the police vehicle up Broadway, toward Times Square. Though a multiplicity of instruments surrounded the windshield, the controls were simplicity itself: a single stick which when pushed forward accelerated the vehicle and when pushed to either side turned it. Apparently the police did not need to be particularly smart. Neither the steering mechanism nor the doors had any locks on them, so far as Ellie could tell. Apparently the drone-men had so little initiative that locks weren’t required. Which would help explain how she and Nadine had escaped so easily.

“How did you know this vehicle was beneath us?” Ellie asked. “How did you know we’d be able to drive it? I almost had a heart attack when you pushed me out on top of it.”

“Way gnarly, wasn’t it? Straight out of a Hong Kong video.” Nadine grinned. “Just call me Michelle Yeoh.”

“If you say so.” She was beginning to rethink her hasty judgment of the lass. Apparently the people of 2004 weren’t quite the shrinking violets she’d made them out to be.

With a flicker and a hum, a square sheet of glass below the windshield came to life. Little white dots of light danced, jittered, and coalesced to form a face.

It was Mr. Tarblecko.

“
Time criminals of the Dawn Era
,” his voice thundered from a hidden speaker. “
Listen and obey
.”

Ellie shrieked, and threw her purse over the visi-plate. “Don’t listento him!” she ordered Nadine. “See if you can find a way of turning this thing off!”

“
Bring the stolen vehicle to a complete halt immediately!
”

To her horror, if not her surprise, Ellie found herself pulling the steering-bar back, slowing the police car to a stop. But then Nadine, in blind obedience to Mr. Tarblecko’s compulsive voice, grabbed for the bar as well. Simultaneously, she stumbled and, with a little
eep
noise, lurched against the bar, pushing it sideways.

The vehicle slewed to one side, smashed into a building wall, and toppled over.

Then Nadine had the roof-hatch open and was pulling her through it. “C’mon!” she shouted. “I can see the black doorway-thingie—the, you know, place!”

Following, Ellie had to wonder about the educational standards of the year 2004. The young lady didn’t seem to have a very firm grasp on the English language.

Then they had reached Times Square and the circle of doorways at its center. The streetlights were flashing and loudspeakers were shouting, “
Akbang! Akbang!
” and police vehicles were converging upon them from every direction, but there was still time. Ellie tapped the nearest doorway with her key. Nothing. The next. Nothing. Then she was running around the building, scraping the key against each doorway, and…there it was!

She seized Nadine’s hand, and they plunged through.

The space inside expanded in a great wheel to all sides. Ellie spun about. There were doors everywhere—and all of them closed. She had not the faintest idea which one led back to her own New York City.

Wait, though! There were costumes appropriate to each time hanging by their doors. If she just went down them until she found a business suit…

Nadine gripped her arm. “Oh, my God!”

Ellie turned, looked, saw. A doorway—the one they had come through, obviously—had opened behind them. In it stood Mr. Tarblecko. Or, to be more precise,
three
Mr. Tarbleckos. They were all as identical as peas in a pod. She had no way of knowing which one, if any, was hers.

“Through here! Quick!” Nadine shrieked. She’d snatched open the nearest door.

Together, they fled through it.

***

“Oolohstullalu ashulalumoota!” a woman sang out. She wore a jumpsuit and carried a clipboard, which she thrust into Ellie’s face. “Oolalula-swula ulalulin.”

“I…I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Ellie faltered. They stood on the green lawn of a gentle slope that led down to the ocean. Down by the beach, enormous construction machines, operated by both men and women (women! of all the astonishing sights she had seen, this was strangest), were rearing an enormous, enigmatic structure, reminiscent to Ellie’s eye of Sunday school illustrations of the Tower of Babel. Gentle tropical breezes stirred her hair.

“Dawn Era, Amerlingo,” the clipboard said. “Exact period uncertain. Answer these questions. Gas—for lights or for cars?”

“For cars, mostly. Although there are still a few—”

“Apples—for eating or computing?”

“Eating,” Ellie said, while simultaneously Nadine said, “Both.”

“Scopes—for dreaming or for resurrecting?”

Neither woman said anything.

The clipboard chirped in a satisfied way. “Early Atomic Age, pre- and post-Hiroshima, one each. You will experience a moment’s discomfort. Do not be alarmed. It is for your own good.”

“Please.” Ellie turned from the woman to the clipboard and back, uncertain which to address. “What’s going on? Where are we? We have so many—”

“There’s no time for questions,” the woman said impatiently. Her accent was unlike anything Ellie had ever heard before. “You must undergo indoctrination, loyalty imprinting, and chronomilitary training immediately. We need all the time-warriors we can get. This base is going to be destroyed in the morning.”

“What? I…”

“Hand me your key.”

Without thinking, Ellie gave the thing to the woman. Then a black nausea overcame her. She swayed, fell, and was unconscious before she hit the ground.

***

“Would you like some heroin?”

The man sitting opposite her had a face that was covered with blackwork tattoo eels. He grinned, showing teeth that had all been filed to a point.

“I beg your pardon?” Ellie was not at all certain where she was, or how she had gotten here. Nor did she comprehend how she could have understood this alarming fellow’s words, for he most certainly had
not
been speaking English.

“Heroin.” He thrust the open metal box of white powder at her. “Do you want a snort?”

“No, thank you.” Ellie spoke carefully, trying not to give offense. “I find that it gives me spots.”

With a disgusted noise, the man turned away.

Then the young woman sitting beside her said in a puzzled way, “Don’t I know you?”

She turned. It was Nadine. “Well, my dear, I should certainly hope you haven’t forgotten me so soon.”

“Mrs. Voigt?” Nadine said wonderingly. “But you’re…you’re…young!”

Involuntarily, Ellie’s hands went up to her face. The skin was taut and smooth. The incipient softening of her chin was gone. Her hair, when she brushed her hands through it, was sleek and full.

She found herself desperately wishing she had a mirror.

“They must have done something. While I was asleep.” She lightly touched her temples, the skin around her eyes. “I’m not wearing any glasses! I can see perfectly!” She looked around her. The room she was in was even more Spartan than the jail cell had been. There were two metal benches facing each other, and on them sat as motley a collection of men and women as she had ever seen. There was a woman who must have weighed three hundred pounds—and every ounce of it muscle. Beside her sat an albino lad so slight and elfin he hardly seemed there at all. Until, that is, one looked at his clever face and burning eyes.
Then
one knew him to be easily the most dangerous person in the room. As for the others, well, none of them had horns or tails, but that was about it.

The elf leaned forward. “Dawn Era, aren’t you?” he said. “If you survive this, you’ll have to tell me how you got here.”

“I–”

“They want you to think you’re as good as dead already. Don’t believe them! I wouldn’t have signed up in the first place, if I hadn’t come back afterwards and told myself I’d come through it all intact.” He winked and settled back. “The situation is hopeless, of course. But I wouldn’t take it seriously.”

Ellie blinked. Was everybody mad here?

In that same instant, a visi-plate very much like the one in the police car lowered from the ceiling, and a woman appeared on it. “Hero mercenaries,” she said, “I salute you! As you already know, we are at the very front lines of the War. The Aftermen Empire has been slowly, inexorably moving backwards into their past, our present, a year at time. So far, the Optimized Rationality of True Men has lost five thousand three hundred and fourteen years to their onslaught.” Her eyes blazed. “That advance ends here! That advance ends now! We have lost so far because, living down-time from the Aftermen, we cannot obtain a technological superiority to them. Every weapon we invent passes effortlessly into their hands.

“So we are going to fight and defeat them, not with technology but with the one quality that, not being human, they lack—human character! Our researches into the far past have shown that superior technology can be defeated by raw courage and sheer numbers. One man with a sunstroker can be overwhelmed by savages equipped with nothing more than neutron bombs—
if
there are enough of them, and they don’t mind dying! An army with energy guns can be destroyed by rocks and sticks and determination.

“In a minute, your transporter and a million more like it will arrive at staging areas afloat in null-time. You will don respirators and disembark. There you will find the time-torpedoes. Each one requires two operators—a pilot and a button-pusher. The pilot will bring you in as close as possible to the Aftermen time-dreadnoughts. The button-pusher will then set off the chronomordant explosives.”

This is madness
, Ellie thought.
I’ll do no such thing
. Simultaneous with the thought came the realization that she had the complex skills needed to serve as either pilot or button-pusher. They must have been given to her at the same time she had been made young again and her eyesight improved.

“Not one in a thousand of you will live to make it anywhere near the time-dreadnoughts. But those few who do will justify the sacrifices of the rest. For with your deaths, you will be preserving humanity from enslavement and destruction! Martyrs, I salute you.” She clenched her fist. “We are nothing! The Rationality is all!”

Then everyone was on his or her feet, all facing the visi-screen, all raising clenched fists in response to the salute, and all chanting as one, “
We are nothing! The Rationality is all!
”

To her horror and disbelief, Ellie discovered herself chanting the oath of self-abnegation in unison with the others, and, worse, meaning every word of it.

The woman who had taken the key away from her had said something about “loyalty imprinting.” Now Ellie understood what that term entailed.

***

In the grey not-space of null-time, Ellie kicked her way into the time-torpedo. It was to her newly sophisticated eyes, rather a primitive thing: Fifteen grams of nano-mechanism welded to a collapsteel hull equipped with a noninertial propulsion unit and packed with five tons of something her mental translator rendered as “annihilatium.” This last, she knew to the core of her being, was ferociously destructive stuff.

Nadine wriggled in after her. “Let me pilot,” she said. “I’ve been playing video games since Mario was the villain in Donkey Kong.”

“Nadine, dear, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.” Ellie settled into the button-pusher slot. There were twenty-three steps to setting off the annihilatium, each one finicky, and if were even one step taken out of order, nothing would happen. She had absolutely no doubt she could do it correctly, swiftly, efficiently.

“Yes?”

“Does all that futuristic jargon of yours actually
mean
anything?”

Nadine’s laughter was cut off by a
squawk
from the visi-plate. The woman who had lectured them earlier appeared, looking stern. “Launch in twenty-three seconds,” she said. “For the Rationality!”

“For the Rationality!” Ellie responded fervently and in unison with Nadine. Inside, however, she was thinking,
How did I get into this?
and then, ruefully,
Well, there’s no fool like an old fool
.

“Eleven seconds…seven seconds…three seconds…one second.”

Nadine launched.

Without time and space, there can be neither sequence nor pattern. The battle between the Aftermen dreadnoughts and the time-torpedoes of the Rationality, for all its shifts and feints and evasions, could be reduced to a single blip of instantaneous action and then rendered into a single binary datum: win/lose.

The Rationality lost.

The time-dreadnoughts of the Aftermen crept another year intothe past.

But somewhere in the very heart of that not-terribly-important battle, two torpedoes, one of which was piloted by Nadine, converged upon the hot-spot of guiding consciousness that empowered and drove the flagship of the Aftermen time-armada. Two button-pushers set off their explosives. Two shockwaves bowed outward, met, meshed, and merged with the expanding shockwave of the countermeasure launched by the dreadnought’s tutelary awareness,