The Time Traveler's Almanac (163 page)

“Rose, you already asked,” said Danny, “and it was a peanut butter protein bar.”

Mr. Daniel Tsai: I am in love with you.

Dr. Tilly held that one for the longest time, gripped between her knees. Once she’d gotten to forty she thought she’d been an emotional bulwark, but now she felt as though all her insides were scooped out and replaced with packing peanuts. She felt thick and heavy. Danny re-read the sign six times, eyes darting to her face before going back and reading it again, and she thought she imagined him swallowing.

“Well,” he said, with admirable calmness, “what do I do with that information, Dr. Rosamund Tilly?”

She scribbled inanely:
I’m not sure? Romantic embraces??

“So you immediately assume I’m in love with you, in a fit of o’erweening hubris,” snapped her best friend, but even as she gaped and horrible dread filled her he made the queerest half-smile expression. The smell of sofa and dusty chinchillas no longer irritated Dr. Tilly. “Don’t mind me,” he said, and Danny leaned over to kiss her. He kissed her kindly until she didn’t want to be kissed kindly any more, at which point he smeared her chapstick from her top lip to her bottom lip. “Please just talk,” he said, and she was too busy trying to memorize the way that his mouth felt and how the cradle of his hips were against her own. “I love you. Say it again.”

“I’ve never loved anyone else,” said Dr. Tilly.

*   *   *

“Well?” Danny Sixteen said. “Did worlds collide?”

*   *   *

This time all she did was unfold herself: got up wearily off the sofa and could not look him in the eye, had that quizzical expression of his burned repulsively into her brain forevermore. Dr. Tilly stood up and paced around the room, hating every hair on her head and every brick in 14 Arden Lane’s walls, and at one point kicked the chimney grate until it hurt her big toe. Danny just watched.

The cellphone buzzed for the umpteenth time in the pocket of her skirt, and now she yanked it out savagely to read:

8:18 PM

Sent from:
Sparrow

Dont forget to fix the fridge mum!

Dr. Tilly imagined that the house was a little sorry as she got the hairdryer and proceeded to defrost everything up to and including the freezer, cartons of milk and meat sitting on the countertop as Danny watched and provided towels. If there had been a Queen’s Award for feeling exhausted, she would have won it. Feeling tired made one feel sadder and when one was sad one felt tireder, and she got down on her knees and scrubbed out the remnants of old carrots as she half-daydreamed about being kissed.

“There,” she said, “are you happy now, you wretched house?” Nothing happened. Her brain burst into tears.

Danny looked at her expression and said, “All right. Plan B,” and did what he did every time she had a pressure headache, which was to turn off the lights so that only a thin filter from the kitchen made its way into the sitting-room. He spread the sofa blanket out on their laps and put his arm around her, and they listened to the far-off roar of cars in the street and the tiny squeaks of chinchillas dust-bathing. Dr. Tilly thought she understood why he was angry: there they were, two people who knew each other so well that just by an expression he could tell what she needed, and all they did was stand and stare at opposite sides of the crevasse.

“A time loop?” he said, when she finally told him. “You’ve got to be kidding me. A
time loop?
You met my doppelgangers?” The expression on her face must have been like a coffee stain that couldn’t be wiped clean, so he relented: “Well, I suppose worlds really did collide.”

The house tried to get back into her good books by making tiny mandarin-coloured lights appear like fireflies, and she nearly forgave it when Danny reached out and let one alight on his finger. When he passed it to her it was sweet and warm like tumbledryer lint. So was his hand.

“Yes,” said Dr. Tilly, “they did, now that I think about it.”

*   *   *

When everyone else in the faculty asked about her tired face the next day, she said “House troubles,” and everyone nodded as though that made any sort of sense. The neighbours had stuffed two notes about the hedge in 14 Arden Lane’s letterbox and the house had retaliated by covering them in snails; the water pressure in her morning shower had been shocking; the house had made jasmine bloom from the ivy trellises, but Rosamund Tilly informed it that this was a poor show and botanically incorrect. It was Danny who had to call her at lunchtime as she sat down to mark some coursework, and she hadn’t any lunch.

“Tuna salad and three crackers,” said Daniel. “You?”

She looked in her desk drawer. “Five Peppermint Tic-Tacs.”

“Rose, that’s disgusting,” he said, and she could hear him drumming a pen on his desk. Danny didn’t mince words: “Look, you can’t go on like this, and I don’t mean your lunch. God only knows what your house will do the next time.”

“It’s lonely,” she said, though her heart wasn’t really into defending it. “The girls are too far away. I was thinking of getting another chinchilla.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a roommate,” he said a bit crisply, “and before you say anything else – I was thinking of me. For one, I’m at your house so often I think I’m legally your common-law friendship-bracelet wife. What do you say?”

Her eyelids undrooped. Her headache cleared. Dr. Tilly’s Tic-Tacs melted on her tongue, sharp and clean and sweet. “I think that might do the trick,” she said.

It did. The plumbing was still terrible, but in Rosamund’s opinion 14 Arden Lane was good as gold.

AGAINST THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE

Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe is an award-winning American science fiction and fantasy writer. His best-known and most highly regarded work is the multi-volume novel The Book of the New Sun. He has written over thirty novels and many short stories. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2007. “Against the Lafayette Escadrille” was first published in the anthology
Again, Dangerous Visions
(edited Harlan Ellison) in 1972.

I have built a perfect replica of a Fokker triplane, except for the flammable dope. It is five meters, seventy-seven centimeters long and has a wing span of seven meters, nineteen centimeters, just like the original. The engine is an authentic copy of an Oberursel UR II. I have a lathe and a milling machine and I made most of the parts for the engine myself, but some had to be farmed out to a company in Cleveland, and most of the electrical parts were done in Louisville, Kentucky.

In the beginning I had hoped to get an original engine, and I wrote my first letters to Germany with that in mind, but it just wasn’t possible; there are only a very few left, and as nearly as I could find out none in private hands. The Oberursel Werke is no longer in existence. I was able to secure plans though, through the cooperation of some German hobbyists. I redrew them myself, translating the German when they had to be sent to Cleveland. A man from the newspaper came to take pictures when the Fokker was nearly ready to fly and I estimated then that I had put more than three thousand hours into building it. I did all the airframe and the fabric work myself, and carved the propeller.

Throughout the project I have tried to keep everything as realistic as possible, and I even have two 7.92 mm Maxim “Spandau” machine-guns mounted just ahead of the cockpit. They are not loaded of course, but they are coupled to the engine with the Fokker Zentralsteuerung interrupter gear.

The question of dope came up because of a man in Oregon I used to correspond with who flies a Nieuport Scout. The authentic dope, as you’re probably aware, was extremely flammable. He wanted to know if I’d used it, and when I told him I had not he became critical.

As I said then. I love the Fokker too much to want to see it burn authentically, and if Antony Fokker and Reinhold Platz had had fireproof dope they would have used it. This didn’t satisfy the Oregon man and he finally became so abusive I stopped replying to his letters. I still believe what I did was correct, and if I had it to do over my decision would be the same.

I have had a trailer specially built to move the Fokker, and I traded my car in on a truck to tow it and carry parts and extra gear, but mostly I leave it at a small field near here where I have rented hangar space, and move it as little as possible on the roads. When I do because of the wide load I have to drive very slowly and only use certain roads. People always stop to look when we pass, and sometimes I can hear them on their front porches calling to others inside to come and see. I think the three wings of the Fokker interest them particularly, and once in a rare while a veteran of the war will see it – almost always a man who smokes a pipe and has a cane. If I can hear what they say it is often pretty foolish, but a light comes into their eyes that I enjoy.

Mostly the Fokker is just in its hangar out at the field and you wouldn’t know me from anyone else as I drive out to fly. There is a black cross painted on the door of my truck, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you. I suppose it wouldn’t have meant anything even if you had seen me on my way out the day I saw the balloon.

It was one of the earliest days of spring, with a very fresh, really indescribable feeling in the air. Three days before I had gone up for the first time that year, coming after work and flying in weather that was a little too bad with not quite enough light left; winter flying, really. Now it was Saturday and everything was changed. I remember how my scarf streamed out while I was just standing on the field talking to the mechanic.

The wind was good, coming right down the length of the field to me, getting under the Fokker’s wings and lifting it like a kite before we had gone a hundred feet. I did a slow turn then, getting a good look at the field with all the new, green grass starting to show, and adjusting my goggles.

Have you ever looked from an open cockpit to see the wing struts trembling and the ground swinging far below? There is nothing like it. I pulled back on the stick and gave it more throttle and rose and rose until I was looking down on the backs of all the birds and I could not be certain which of the tiny roofs I saw was the house where I live or the factory where I work. Then I forgot looking down, and looked up and out, always remembering to look over my shoulder especially, and to watch the sun where the S.E. 5a’s of the Royal Flying Corps love to hang like dragonflies, invisible against the glare.

Then I looked away and I saw it, almost on the horizon, an orange dot. I did not, of course, know then what it was; but I waved to the other members of the Jagstaffel I command and turned toward it, the Fokker thrilling to the challenge. It was moving with the wind, which meant almost directly away from me, but that only gave the Fokker a tailwind, and we came at it – rising all the time.

It was not really orange-red as I had first thought. Rather it was a thousand colors and shades, with reds and yellows and white predominating. I climbed toward it steeply with the stick drawn far back, almost at a stall. Because of that I failed, at first, to see the basket hanging from it. Then I leveled out and circled it at a distance. That was when I realized it was a balloon. After a moment I saw, too, that it was of very old-fashioned design with a wicker basket for the passengers and that someone was in it. At the moment the profusion of colors interested me more, and I went slowly spiraling in until I could see them better, the Easter egg blues and the blacks as well as the reds and whites and yellows.

It wasn’t until I looked at the girl that I understood. She was the passenger, a very beautiful girl, and she wore crinolines and had her hair in long chestnut curls that hung down over her bare shoulders. She waved to me, and then I understood. The ladies of Richmond had sewn it for the Confederate army, making it from their silk dresses. I remembered reading about it. The girl in the basket blew me a kiss and I waved to her, trying to convey with my wave that none of the men of my command would ever be allowed to harm her; that we had at first thought that her craft might be a French or Italian observation balloon, but that for the future she need fear no gun in the service of the Kaiser’s Flugzeugmeisterei.

I circled her for some time then, she turning slowly in the basket to follow the motion of my plane, and we talked as well as we could with gestures and smiles. At last when my fuel was running low I signaled her that I must leave. She took, from a container hidden by the rim of the basket, a badly shaped, corked brown bottle. I circled even closer, in a tight bank, until I could see the yellow, crumbling label. It was one of the very early soft drinks, an original bottle. While I watched she drew the cork, drank some, and held it out symbolically to me.

Then I had to go. I made it back to the field, but I landed dead stick with my last drop of fuel exhausted when I was half a kilometer away. Naturally I had the Fokker refueled at once and went up again, but I could not find her balloon.

I have never been able to find it again, although I go up almost every day when the weather makes it possible. There is nothing but an empty sky and a few jets. Sometimes, to tell the truth, I have wondered if things would not have been different if, in finishing the Fokker, I had used the original, flammable dope. She was so authentic. Sometimes toward evening I think I see her in the distance, above the clouds, and I follow as fast as I can across the silent vault with the Fokker trembling around me and the throttle all the way out; but it is only the sun.

SWING TIME

Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn is an American writer who has written several novels in her
New York Times
bestselling series about a werewolf named Kitty. She also wrote the young-adult novels
Voices of Dragons
and
Steel
(which was named to the ALA’s 2012 Amelia Bloomer list of the best books for young readers with strong feminist content), and the novels
Discord’s Apple
and
After the Golden Age.
She is a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared-world superhero books edited by George R.R. Martin, and her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. This story originally appeared in the June 2007 issue of
Jim Baen’s Universe.