All the Colors of Time (12 page)

His face lit up. “Sure!”

“Good. Then we’ll go see Gramma, then go home so you can do
your homework and I’ll call Trev—”

“Mom, please.”

“She’s lonely, Alec. She loves it when we visit her.”

“She doesn’t even know who I am. She asked if I was her
neighbor’s grandson last time.”

“She’s sick, Alec. She can’t help what’s happened to her.
She needs us.”

He subsided, but she recognized the mutinous set of his jaw.

It was one of Helen Glen’s better days. She remembered who
Alec was. She even remembered that Robert was gone. She didn’t ask where he
was. She asked about baseball and Alec thawed. He talked about baseball,
school, his beloved lizard, Skinky. He thawed, warmed to her, smiled, laughed
and promised to come again, soon.

Sharon felt a glow of warmth and accomplishment rise up to
envelope her. For the first time since she had moved her mother-in-law here,
she was not affected by the atmosphere of the place, which had always seemed to
her almost a silent, ambient moan of loss and pain. It was hard to be here, but
Alec had done it.

He had grown quiet again by the time they reached the car,
and gazed around at his surroundings, seeming to notice the sun on the grass,
the leaves glittering in the trees, the birds singing, the quiet walkways along
which strolled or glided inmates with their visiting loved ones.

He was silent as they negotiated the wooded streets and
headed home.

“Gramma had a really good day today, didn’t she?” Sharon
asked rhetorically. “You could see she really loved visiting with us.”

“But we can’t be there every day. We can only go there
sometimes, and in between, she doesn’t have anybody.”

Encouraging. He was empathizing. Feeling for his
grandmother. “Well, she has friends there, honey, and her nurses and doctors.”

“That’s not the same thing. They get paid to be there. And
sometimes I’ll bet her friends don’t even remember her—don’t even know she’s
there.”

Sharon smiled. “Then I suppose we’ll just have to visit more
often, huh?”

“Yeah.”

While she congratulated herself, he turned his face up to
her, his eyes troubled. “But it’s not fair, mom. Gramma shouldn’t have to live
like that.” He blinked as if tears were threatening to come and turned his head
away so she wouldn’t see them. Sunlight spattered his face, making him squint. “No
one should ever have to live like that.”

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“The Doctor’s Wife” was published in
Analog
in 1992. It poses one of the classic time travel paradoxes.
I’m not going to say which one—you’ll have to find that out as you read.
Suffice it to say that it is exactly this type of time travel experience that
Rules Were Put In Place to Address. The story allowed me to combine my love of
maritime history and ships with science fiction. The
Essex
was a real ship and quite as imposing and tricky as
described. Her encounter with the French
Piémontaise
happened pretty much as I describe.

oOo

My family has always gone down to the Sea in ships. I am
told that the first Dunbar shipped out of Norway on a leaky Viking longship.
Probably a stowaway. First of many. For some reason, Dunbars like being
stowaways. The thrill of danger, perhaps, or obsessive curiosity or arrested
development.

Not that I’m denigrating my ancestors. I’m no exception. I,
too, hitch unauthorized rides on tall ships. The only difference between me and
the other Dunbar riff-raff is that I get paid for it. That is, I have a grant,
which amounts to the same thing.

I am not, and never have been a good student. I have gotten
this far in my post-doctoral by the skin of my Celtic teeth. I do produce
results. I do well at peer reviews. But I have this penchant for—shall we
say—becoming involved with my subject matter. Really involved.

Case in point: My most recent project. Regency England.
Commerce as a Tool of Imperialism.
A
broad area of study. Too broad, I thought, and narrowed it down to the British
East India Company. Then I narrowed it down a little further to a ship named
Essex
.

Now the
Essex
was
of particular interest for a number of reasons. One is that she was reputed to
have carried more sails than any ship ever rigged—sixty-three in all. She also
may have seen the first use of camouflage, having one side painted differently
than the other so as to confuse privateers and French sea captains. Then there
was her Master, Captain Charles Dunbar—“Black Charley” Dunbar to the general
public, many times great grampa Charley to me.

When I arrived in London, it was winter 2115. A crisp,
chill, unutterably beautiful, travel poster day. I longed to spend time on the
piers inhaling brine, but my Shift-Eye (aka Human Observer) was not in the mood
to freeze his tush off while I pined for the days when ships sailed in water
instead of over it and wind power was the
puissance
du jour.
He hustled me and my Temporal Grid Enclosure (TeGrEn) quickly
through check out.

QuestLabs advises Time Travelers not to carry “unnecessary
baggage.” In my humble opinion, that’s as good a description of a Shift-Eye as
you’re likely to find. Their function is ostensibly to assist in transporting
and setting up equipment, monitor the Shift and the Traveler’s vitals, and pull
him or her back in case something goes wrong. In the thirty-five years since
QuestLabs began licensing the Temporal Shift Technology, so little has gone
wrong that the Shift-Eye rarely does more than sit around drinking coffee and
watching reruns of
Dr. Who
on SF-Net.

I’d shuttled my Grid to London, air freight, cleverly
disguised as a shipping crate of the type used by the East India Company circa
1800. Brought it to the docks in an aero-lorry.

That was actually cheaper than making a Trans-Atlantic
Retrotemporal Shift and I was trying to show a few Full Fellows that I could be
frugal with QuestLab’s resources.

I Shifted at mid-day so as not to discomfit my Shift-Eye. I
discomfited myself instead, arriving on the London docks (again) at midnight.
It was late spring, 1805. The war with France was in full swing. Nelson was
already a hero, and was closing fast on immortality. The sea lanes were a
shooting gallery. It was a dangerous time to be at sea on a British East
Indiaman, which, I suppose, is why I wanted to be there. Call it a death wish—I
suspected my ancestor had similar cravings.

The TeGrEn’s spatial interference detector (SID) correctly
determined that I could not occupy the same surface coordinates as those real
crates stacked right where I’d been (or would be) three-hundred-some-odd years
hence. It faded itself, myself and my Crate gently into being about a yard from
the spot. There was no one around, according to SID, to see the apparition.
Unless you happened to count the insensate gentleman two crates to my right.

I cautiously exited the TeGrEn and slid it up against its
neighbors on silent Grav-Ex coasters. Then I went, as they say, for a little “rec’y.”

The best laid plans of Arthur Dunbar
gang ne’er agley
—or at least they so rarely do that it doesn’t
count. The crates my TeGrEn nestled against belonged to that magnificent,
towering vision just across the pier, and that vision was the
Essex
.

She rocked gently, bow sprit thrust over the planking like a
questing arm, masts sequoia-tall, tickling the unseen stars through their
blanket of thick, archetypal fog. She murmured in her sleep, too, musically;
she did not snore like the sodden gentleman behind me. I listened to her croon
a while—absorbing the polyrhythm of wave-lap and rope-tap, the close violin
harmonies of light breezes through ratlines—then returned to my time machine. I
felt kinship with a certain H.G. Wells hero as I slipped in, swung the door
into place and settled down to wait.

I slept. I wasn’t supposed to sleep. That was one of the
reasons for Shifting at midday Gridtime. But I had chosen the comfort of my
bunk over the uprightness of my console chair and I could hear
Essex’
s silken cooing through the
external monitor and it lulled me completely. I dreamed I was already aboard
her, rocked like a baby in a warm, close cradle, the scent of tar and brine and
pine pitch caressing my dozing senses.

I woke suddenly, aware of a braying sound, and was surprised
to find that the rocking was no dream and that the braying was laughter. That
faded, the rocking continued ceaselessly. I was aboard the
Essex,
I realized, and had obviously slept right through the
loading of my Crate. Just as well, really. It made for less time with nothing
to do but study history and make useless log entries.

I checked the external monitor. It was dark as the inside of
the idiomatic hat. I assumed that the hatch was closed and that the crew, from
the sound of it, was in full swing up on deck. I palmed the door release,
thinking I would take a quick look around by disclite. The damn thing clicked,
hummed and stayed perfectly shut. I tried again. Same result. I could see it
now—banner headline:
Post-graduate
Student Found Mummified in Time Machine.

Muttering veiled obscenities, I pushed against the door with
the flat of my hand. When that didn’t work, I panned the external monitor.
Uniform blackness met my eyes. Next I ordered SID to perform a sweep of the
immediate area. As I suspected, the TeGrEn and I were neatly hemmed in on all
sides by immovable, solid objects. I should have foreseen that, of course, but
hadn’t. It meant another Shift (my Eye would be having fits) and disarranging
the
Essex’
s neatly packed cargo hold.
Always supposing that there was even a place large enough for me to Shift to.

I put SID on it. He (you will pardon my anthropomorphizing,
but when you travel alone in a crate no bigger than a small horse box, it comes
naturally) came back with a barely big enough spot just below the forward
hatch. I fed the data through the Plotter and in a moment’s time had skipped
back several minutes, Shifted sideways about four yards and come up in SID’s
targeted location.

The din of falling crates was like a convention of rock
drummers, all soloing madly and cranked to eleven. Inside my safe-haven, I
cringed comfortably and waited. The hold was crawling with sailors in the wink
of an eye. I adjusted the external monitor and was rewarded with a striped view
of a gaggle of ancient and not-so-ancient mariners swarming down the central
aisle.

“Aye! Here’t be!” announced one gnarled specimen. “Holy
Mother, will ye look a’ tha’! O’Hara, I thought you scum packed this tight.”

“Did, Mr. Piggott, sir.” The wiry O’Hara bounced as if he
were on a spring. “Tom Farley and Matthew will attest to that.”

“Aye? Well, it ain’t tight now, Cargo-master. Get your boys
on’t now or we’ll be late t’sail. The Master’d not take kind t’tha.”

“No, the Master would not take at all kind to that.”

The voice was big and it came from directly above me. As I
scrambled to orient myself to that fact, two booted legs appeared in my
striated “portal” and I realized the TeGrEn was tucked in under the forward
ladder. The man descending the ladder was twice the size of his voice. He
effectively blocked my view of the other men.

I sucked air and held it. Black Charley.

“Who’s responsible for this mess?” he asked, his voice
smooth and soft as the velvet coat that covered his broad shoulders.

Well dressed, I thought. Somehow I hadn’t expected that,
though I knew that Charles Dunbar, like a good many East India shipmasters, was
a fairly wealthy man. A goodly amount of the stowage in this hold might very
well belong to him, personally.

“Well?” the voice roared. I could almost see the sailors
cringing into their cargo.

“It were secure, Cap’n,” stated a wheeze-whine voice—Piggott’s,
I thought. “Absolute, sir.”

“Well, it isn’t secure now. See to it. And whoever’s
responsible . . . watch your step. Those’re my personal goods.”

He swung about then, and I got a glimpse of his face. It was
long, square-jawed—chiseled, as they say—with high cheek bones and aquiline
nose. Dark brows, beard and hair and pale frost-bit eyes sharpened the focus
dramatically. He was my ancestor, no doubt about it.

We pulled away from the docks in about three hours time. I
tried to concentrate on period history, noting what I could or could not know,
say or do. But
Essex
was making it
hard to keep my mind on that pursuit. I could feel the water gliding beneath
the keel, could hear the symphony of creaks and rustles and gurgles as she made
her stately way down the Thames to the Channel.

It was safer in the box. I knew that. Especially since I’d
been forced to call attention to the hold. I was not supposed to be found until
we cleared the mouth of the Channel. But I had—absolutely had—to see what was
happening topside. I slipped out quietly—as if I could really be heard by
anybody but the ship’s cat—and shined my disclite surreptitiously about. The
forward hatch would not be an ideal place to peer from, so I made my way aft, seeking
a ventilation shaft I recalled seeing in a decking plan.

Finding it was easy enough (I gave my memory a pat on the
back), but reaching it was something else again. There was a pile of burlap
bags between me and it, all packed to the seams with something. Peat, I
realized as I began my climb.

I reached the top of the heap without too much difficulty
and poked my head up into the shaft above it. The view was not terrific, but it
beat the inside of the TeGrEn all to pieces.

Iron bars crisscrossed a sweeping panorama of satiny
decking, coils of rope, the butt of a nearby cannon and the juncture between
deck and mainmast. I could also just see the starboard rail, and feet—lots of
feet.