All the Colors of Time
Read All the Colors of Time Online
Authors: Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
Tags: #science fiction, #time travel, #world events, #history, #alternate history
ALL THE COLORS OF TIME
Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
Book View Café Edition
June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61138-389-8
Copyright © 2014 Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
Other Books by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
In 1960, George Pal produced the movie
The Time Machine,
based on the novel by
H.G. Wells. I saw it when I was about twelve, as I recall, on a Los Angeles TV
station that played nonstop movies. I was fascinated. I was repelled. It was
the first time I had come in contact with the concept of time travel.
In 1966, I learned from a
Star Trek
episode (“Tomorrow is Yesterday”) that if you get stuck
in 1969 and have a warp-worthy space craft, you can slingshot around the Sun to
get back to your own time. That same year, I was amazed to discover that you
can also time travel by stepping into a vertigo-inducing tunnel—a
Time Tunnel
, in fact.
A decade or so later, I came across the concept again in a
curious British production called
Dr.
Who,
starring a mesmerizing fellow with a mop of ginger hair, huge eyes and
a 3,000 candle-watt smile. I was hooked—by the Doctor, by the sheer Britishness
of it, and by the premise and spirit of the show. I wanted to be a Companion. I
went to Dr. Who conventions; I dressed up as Tegan Jervanka (companion to
Doctor #5) and cultivated an Australian accent so as to win costume
competitions.
By that time, I was writing science fiction, though I’d yet
to be published, and it seemed somehow natural that I should write about time
travel. Now, some folks consider time travel to be sheer fantasy, not science
fiction. Fortunately for me, when I penned my first time travel story in 1990,
I sent it to Stan Schmidt at
Analog
,
who did not consider it fantasy. He published it and gave it the cover.
That was the novella
Heroes
,
which is the first story in this collection. As I continued to write time
travel stories, I decided that all time tunnels led back to this technology I
had developed (conceptually, at least), which I call Temporal Shift Technology.
Of its technical aspects, I can only say that it functions because light is
both a particle and a wave and has frequencies. TST moves people and spaceships
through shifts along this frequency spectrum and … well, I guess you just have
to be there.
All the stories in this volume are connected by this
technology and exist along—what else—a time continuum. It’s this technology
that ties all of my space travel stories together, so much so that the final
story in the collection brings in a parallel thread—the series of
Analog
stories about Rhys Llewellyn,
xeno-archaeologist.
Indeed, all of these stories appeared in
Analog
Science Fiction magazine between
1990 and 2000. I hope you enjoy reading them.
This story first appeared in
Analog
in 1990 with a brilliant cover and interior art by Frank Kelly Freas. It is the
first story in which my time travel technology—Temporal Shift—appears. As a
point of historical reference to the events in the story, I wrote it in 1989
before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
oOo
There was silence in the Operating Room except for Shiro
Tsubaki’s soft voice counting elapsed time. Behind the broad expanse of
duo-glass that looked down on the Theatre the technicians’ faces flickered with
reflected data from their computer displays. The video monitors each showed the
scene from the Theatre below—a static scene in which a small cylindrical robot
sat in a shimmering field of dancing motes.
Trevor Haley watched the same scene through the window,
waiting tensely for something to happen.
“Shifting,” said Shiro’s voice.
Trevor blinked, his eyes straining to see any change in the
bot. There was a change, all right. The little machine’s solid lines began to
waver and bleed into the shimmer around it. Before he could blink again, it was
gone. He pulled his attention back to his console.
“Shifting to Green minus one,” said Shiro. The counter on
her monitor ticked off a series of numbers that looked like seconds, but were
not. “Shifting Aqua minus one . . .” Another silence followed. “Shifting
Blue minus one . . . minus two. Stop Shift at . . .
Blue minus six. That’s negative thirty-six.”
Someone said, “Wow,” and the entire Operating Room breathed
a sigh of relief.
“Halfway there,” murmured Magda Oslovski. “Five minutes,
Shiro.”
“Counting.”
Oslovski shifted in her seat. “Video status?”
“Fully functional.” George Wu shook his head, trying to
clear the sense of unreality. “The video carousel is at thirty degrees. We
ought to have some great footage.”
“Let’s hear Toto’s stats, Trev.”
Trevor stirred. “Temperature: eighteen degrees Celsius;
humidity: sixty percent—a little higher than normal for the time of year;
attitude: five degrees from upright and adjusting.”
Oslovski nodded. “It’d be nice if we could maintain video
contact.”
George Wu snorted. “Right. Maintain an optic link across a
temporal spectrum. Piece of cake.”
“There was a time,” said Oslovski in her
when-I-was-an-eager-young-scientist voice, “when an optic link between
cities
was science fiction. Now it’s
just science—
old
science. Mark my
words, George, given enough time—”
“Movement,” said Trevor. “Thirty degrees, three meters
distance. Object reads . . . less than a meter in height, about
a meter long. Damn, I wish we could see . . .” He peered at the
shifting readings on his display. “This is weird. The object is moving and
part
of the object is moving
independently. Closing to two meters. Independent movement is rhythmic, uh . . .
It’s like, uh—” He waved his hand back and forth.
“Someone waving?” suggested Shiro.
“One meter tall?”
“Not waving,
wagging
,”
suggested George. “It’s a—It’s a dog!” He shrugged when everybody turned to
look at him. “Well, it
sounds
like a
dog.”
“Object at one meter.”
“You know if that
is
a dog,” said George, “it just might mistake Toto for a fire hydrant.”
Oslovski grimaced. “Great. We may get to see how well he
withstands precipitation.”
“I don’t think that’s what the Techs had in mind,” George
murmured.
“Two minutes,” announced Shiro.
They continued to spout data intermittently for another
three minutes, watching the progress of the “dog-like object” carefully. At the
end of a full five minutes, Oslovski gave the order to reverse the field.
“Reversing field,” announced Shiro.
Trevor laughed. “Object radiating percussive audio vibration
and receding rapidly at 30 degrees.”
“Ah,” said George. “What is the sound of one dog barking?”
“Shifting to Blue minus one,” said Shiro. “Aqua minus ten . . .
Green minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one and zero.”
Every eye in the room went to the monitor that displayed the
contents of the Theatre. In the shimmering field, the bot appeared, looking no
different than it had when it left.
“Welcome back to Oz, Toto,” someone murmured.
The O.R. exploded in a spontaneous cheer. Hugs and laughter
and silly dances followed in a ritual celebration of accomplishment so ancient
it had probably marked the creation of the first successful Folsom point.
It lasted for all of thirty seconds. Then the backslaps
dwindled to pats, the laughter died to throat clearing coughs, the flushed
faces drained of color and hilarity. Six pairs of eyes swung to Magda Oslovski.
She read the questions in them and sighed, feeling suddenly
and incongruously depressed. “Okay,” she said. “We did it. Presumably we did it
successfully. Now we gather up our data and study it. We write our lab reports
and . . . and move on to Phase Five.”
People looked at their shoes. People looked at their
handcomps. People frowned.
“Magda,” said Trevor Haley tentatively, “when are we going
to report to the Chiefs? You’ve been holding them off for the better part of a
year with ‘steady progress is being made.’ We’ve shown them disappearing fruit
tricks and talked about it being years before we dare Shift human subjects. At
some point they’ve got to be brought up to date.”
“I have
not
been
holding them off. I’ve been . . . cautious. Do you think we
should let them in on all Phases of the Project?”
“I didn’t say that. I just . . . wondered . . .”
“When the axe was going to fall?” asked Shiro.
“Falling axes have to do with being fired,” George reminded
her. “I don’t think for a moment the Chiefs are going to let us get off that
easy.”
“No, they’re not.” Oslovski scratched at the edge of her
handcomp with a well-manicured thumbnail. “In fact, General Caldwell and
company are due here next Monday to check in on us. I didn’t tell you before,”
she added over a chorus of protests, “because I knew it would affect your work . . .
and your health.”
She looked up. Her eyes had that steely look she was famous
for. “I haven’t decided how much we’re going to tell them yet. Gather up your
goodies, people. Staff meeting in half an hour.”
Thirty-five minutes later, a subdued group congregated in
the Level 3 Conference Room and took their places around its large oval table.
Magda Oslovski was the last to arrive. She seated herself at the head of the
table and called the group to order.
“All right, folks. I’m going to turn this over to George and
company for show and tell. George?”
George Wu popped a video disc into the console set into the
table-top before him. He glanced at his assistant, Louis Manyfeather, then
threw the rest of the group a nervous grin. “I’ve got to admit, we peeked,” he
said. “This is great!”
He started the playback. Around the table, video displays
came to life. The title screen showed first: Project Hourglass—Phase
Four—4/21/64. Then they saw a dewy sward of close-cropped grass from roughly
the vantage point of a four year old child. About four meters distant, a border
of evergreen shrubbery blocked their view of the trunks of a variety of trees.
The video image panned slowly, showing more of the same.
Through the trees a building came into view—low and squat
and square and composed predominantly of greenish tinted glass and strips of
pink granite. The image panned along the building further. Then something else
came into view. A chuckle rolled around the table.
“There’s your ‘dog-like object,’ Trev,” said Shiro. “I think
it’s an Airdale.”
“Told you so,” said George.
The Airdale disappeared as the video unit continued its
sweep. They saw more grass, a metal sprinkler head, the roof of another
building.
“Wait! Pause that!” said Oslovski. “That’s the roof of the
Library building, isn’t it? You can’t even see that from here, now.”
Heads nodded absently. The slow pan continued and concluded,
and the screens went dark. Toto’s audio recorder let out a wild yelp and a
short series of barks. There were a few chuckles.
“Now,” said George, “Louis hit the archives and came up with
this.” He slid a second disc into the unit. The displays lit up again with a
still shot of a very similar scene. “This is the Campus fifty-five years ago.
The photo was taken from the steps of what was then the Psychology building.
That lawn is now covered by this facility. The white ‘x’ in the grass marks the
spot in the O.R. where Toto was Shifting.” He paused, ran a hand through his
thick, black hair. “Ladies and gentlemen, we just sent Toto back fifty-six
years in time. Chances are we can just as easily send him into the future.”