Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (3 page)

"But," said Lydia. "I mean, why us? I mean, assuming you really do have the makings of a time machine in your laundry room. Why not reach out to some actual scientists?" Then she answered her own question: "Because you would be worried they would tell the government. Okay, but the world is full of smart amateurs and clever geeks. And us? I mean, I work the day shift at a..." she tried to think of a way to say "pirate-themed sex shop" that didn't sound quite so horrible. "And Malik is a physical therapist. Jerboa has a physics degree, sure, but that was years ago, and more recently Jerboa's been working as a case worker for teenagers with sexual abuse issues. Which is totally great. But I'm sure you can find bigger experts out there."

"One has chosen with the greatest of care," Madame Alberta fixed Lydia with an intense stare, like she could see all the way into Lydia's damaged core. (Or maybe like someone who was used to wearing glasses, but had decided to pretend she had 20/20 vision.) "You are all good people, with the strong moral centers. You have given much thought to the time travel, and yet you speak of it without any avarice in your hearts. Not once have I heard any of you talk of using the time travel for wealth or personal advancement."

"Well, except for Normando using it to get in Ladyswirl's pants," said Malik.

"Even as you say, except for Normando." Madame Alberta did another one of her painful-to-watch bow-curtseys. "So. What is your decision? Will you join me in this great and terrible undertaking, or not?" What could they do? They all raised their hands and said that they were in.

Ricky was the Chief Fascination Evangelist for Garbo.com, a web startup for rich paranoid people who wanted to be left alone. (They were trying to launch a premium service where you could watch yourself via satellite 24/7, to make sure nobody else was watching you.) Ricky wore denim shirts, with the sleeves square-folded to the elbows, and white silk ties with black corduroys, and his neck funneled out of the blue-jean collar and led to a round pale head, shaved except for wispy sideburns. He wore steel-rimmed glasses. He had a habit of swinging his arms back and forth and clapping his hands when he was excited, like when he talked about getting a satellite into orbit.

"Everybody else says it'll take months to get our baby into space," Ricky told Malik and Lydia for the fifth or sixth time. "The Kazakhs don't even know when they can do it. But you say you can get our Garbo-naut 5000 into orbit..."

"... next week," Malik said yet again. "Maybe ten days from now." He canted his palms in mid-air, like it was no big deal. Launching satellites, whatever. Just another day, putting stuff into orbit.

"Whoa." Ricky arm-clapped in his chair. "That is just insane. Seriously. Like, nuts."

"We are a hungry new company." Malik gave the same bright smile that he used to announce the start of every Time Travel Club meeting. They had been lucky to find this guy. "We want to build our customer base from the ground up. All the way from the ground, into space. Because we're a space company. Right? Of course we are. And did I mention we're hungry?"

"Hungry is good." Ricky seemed to be studying Malik, and the giant photo of MJL Aerospace's non-existent rocket, a retrofitted Soyuz. "The hungry survive, the fat starve. Or something. So when do I get to see this rocket of yours?"

"You can't, sorry," Malik said. "Our, uh, chief rocket scientist is kind of leery about letting people see our proprietary new fuel system technology up close. But here's a picture of it." He gestured at the massive rocket picture on the fake-mahogany wall behind his desk, which they'd spent hours creating in Photoshop and After Effects. MJL Aerospace was subletting ultra-cheap office space in an industrial park, just up the highway from the Lusty Doubloon.

Malik, Lydia, and Jerboa had been excited about becoming a fake rocket company, until they'd started considering the practical problems. For one thing, nobody will hire you to launch a satellite unless you've already launched a satellite before—it's like how you can't get an entry-level job unless you've already had work experience.

Plus, they weren't entirely sure that they could get a satellite into a stable orbit, which was one of the dozen reasons Malik was sweating. They could definitely place a satellite at different points in orbit, and different trajectories, by adjusting the time of day, the distance traveled, and the location on Earth they started from. But after that, the satellite wouldn't be moving fast enough to stay in orbit on its own. It would need extra boosters, to get up to speed. Jerboa thought they could send a satellite way higher—around forty-two thousand kilometers away from Earth—and then use relatively small rockets to speed it up to the correct velocity as it slowly dropped to the correct orbit. But even if that worked, it would require Garbo.com to customize the Garbo-naut 5000 quite a bit. And Madame Alberta had severe doubts.

"Sorry, man," said Ricky. "I'm not sure I can get my people to authorize a satellite launch based on just seeing a picture of the rocket. It's a nice picture, though. Good sense of composition. Like, the clouds look really pretty, with that one flock of birds in the distance. Poetic, you know."

"Of course you can see the rocket," Lydia interjected. She was sitting off to one side taking notes on the meeting, wearing cheap pantyhose in a forty-dollar swivel chair. With puffy sleeves covering her tattoos (one for every country she'd ever visited). "Just maybe not before next week's launch. If you're willing to wait a few months, we can arrange a site visit and stuff. We just can't show you the rocket before our next launch window."

"Right," Malik said. "If you still want to launch next week, though, we can give you a 60 percent discount."

"60 percent?" Ricky said, suddenly seeming interested again.

"65 percent," Malik said. "We're a young, hungry company. We have a lot to prove. Our business model is devouring the weak. And we hate to launch with spare capacity."

Maybe going straight to 65 percent was a mistake, or maybe the "devouring the weak" thing had been too much. In any case, Ricky seemed uneasy again. "Huh," he said. "So how many test launches have you guys done? My friend who works for NASA says every rocket launch in the world gets tracked."

"We've done a slew of test launches," Malik said. "Like, a dozen. But we have some proprietary stealth technology, so people probably missed them." And then, he went way off script. "Our company founder, Augustus Marzipan IV, grew up around rockets. His uncle was Wernher von Braun's wine steward. So rockets are in his blood." Ricky's frown got more and more pinched.

"Well," Ricky said at last, standing up from his cheap metal chair. "I will definitely bring your proposal to our Senior Visionizer, Terry. But I have a feeling the V.C.s aren't going to want to pay for a launch without kicking the tires. I'm not the one who writes the checks, you know. If I wrote the checks, a lot of things would be different." And then he paused, probably imagining all the things that would happen if he wrote the checks.

"When Augustus Marzipan was only five years old, his pet Dalmatian, Henry, was sent into space. Never to return," said Malik, as if inventing more stories would cushion his fall off the cliff he'd already walked over. "That's where our commitment to safety comes from."

"That's great," said Ricky. "I love dogs." He was already halfway out the door.

As soon as Ricky was gone, Malik sagged as though the air had gone out of him. He rubbed his brow with one listless hand. "We're a young, hungry company," he said. "We're a hungry, young company. Which way sounds better? I can't tell."

"That could have gone worse," Lydia said.

"I can't do this," Malik said. "I just can't. I'm sorry. I am good at pretending for fun. I just can't do it for money. I'm really sorry."

Lydia felt like the worst person in the world, even as she said: "Lots of people start out pretending for fun, and then move into pretending for money. That's the American dream." The sun was already going down behind the cement fountain outside, and she realized she was going to be late for her twelve-step group soon. She started pulling her coat and purse and scarf together. "Hey, I gotta run. I'll see you at Time Travel Club, okay?"

"I think I'm going to skip it," Malik said. "I can't. I just... I can't."

"What?" Lydia felt like if Malik didn't come to Time Travel Club, it would be the proof that something was seriously wrong and their whole foundation was splitting apart. And it would be provably her fault.

"I'm just too exhausted. Sorry."

Lydia came over and sat on the desk, so she could see Malik's face behind his hand.

"Come on," she pleaded. "Time Travel Club is your baby. We just can't have a meeting without you. That would be weird. Come on. We won't even talk about being a fake aerospace company. We couldn't talk about that in front of Normando, anyway."

Malik sighed, like he was going to argue. Then he lifted the loop of his tie all the way off, now that he was done playing CEO. For a second, his rep-stripe tie was a halo. "Okay, fine," he said. "It'll be good to hang out and not talk business for a while."

"Yeah, exactly. It'll be mellow," Lydia said. She felt the terror receding, but not entirely.

Normando was freaking out, because his girlfriend in 1973 had dumped him. (Long story short, his strategy of arriving earlier and earlier for the same first date had back-fired.) A couple of other semi-regulars showed up too, including Betty the Cyborg from the Dawn of Time. And Madame Alberta showed up too, even though she hadn't ever shown any interest in visiting their aerospace office. She sat in the corner, studying the core members of the group, maybe to judge whether she'd chosen wisely. As if she could somehow go back and change that decision, which of course she couldn't.

Malik tried to talk about his last trip to the thirty-second century. But he kept staring at his CEO shoes and saying things like, "The neo-Babylonians were giving us grief. But we were young and hungry." And then trailing off, like his heart just wasn't in it.

Jerboa saw Malik running out of steam, and jumped in. "I met Christopher Marlowe. He told me that his version of Faust originally ended with Dr. Faust and Helen of Troy running away together and teaching geometrically complex hand-dances in Shropshire, and they made him change it." Jerboa talked very fast, like an addict trying to stay high. Or a comedian trying not to get booed offstage. "He told me to call him 'Kit,' and showed me the difference between a doublet and a singlet. A doublet is not two singlets, did you know that?"

Sitting in the Unitarian basement, under the purple dove hands, Lydia watched Malik starting to say things and then just petering out, with a shrug or a shake of the head, and Jerboa rattling on and not giving anybody else a chance to talk. Guilt.

And then, just as Lydia was crawling out of her skin, Madame Alberta stood up. "I have a thing to confess," she said.

Malik and Lydia stared up at her, fearing she was about to blow the whistle on their scam. Jerboa stopped breathing.

"I am from an alternative timeline," Madame Alberta said. "It is the world where the American Revolution did not happen, and the British Empire had the conquest of all of South America. The Americas, Africa, Asia—the British ruled all. Until the rest of Europe launched the great world war to stop the British imperialism. And Britain discovered the nuclear weapons and Europe burned, to ashes. I travel many times, I travel through time, to try and change history. But instead, I find myself here, in this other universe, and I can never return home."

"Uh," Malik said. "Thanks for sharing." He looked relieved and weirded out.

At last, Madame Alberta explained: "It is the warning. Sometimes you have the power to change the world. But power is not an opportunity. It is a choice."

After that, nobody had much to say. Malik and Jerboa didn't look at Lydia or each other as they left, and nobody was surprised when the Time Travel Club's meeting was canceled the following week, or when the club basically ceased to exist some time after that.

Malik, Jerboa, and Lydia sat in the front of Malik's big van on the grassy roadside, waiting for Madame Alberta to come back and tell them where they were going. Madame Alberta supposedly knew where they could dig up some improperly buried spent uranium from the power plant, and the back of the van was full of pretty good safety gear that Madame Alberta had scared up for them. The faceplates of the suits glared up at Lydia from their uncomfortable resting place. The three of them were psyching themselves up to go and possibly irradiate the shit out of themselves.

Worth it, if the thing they were helping to build in Madame Alberta's laundry room was a real time machine and not just another figment.

"You guys never even asked," Lydia said around one in the morning, when they were all starting to wonder if Madame Alberta was going to show up. "I mean, about me, and why I was in that twelve-step group before the Time Travel Club meetings. You don't know anything about me, or what I've done."

"We know all about you," Malik said. "You're a pirate."

"You do extreme solar-sail sports in the future," Jerboa added. "What else is there to know?"

"But," Lydia said. "I could be a criminal. I might have killed someone. I could be as bad as that astral projection guy."

"Lydia," Malik put one hand on her shoulder, like super gently. "We know you."

Nobody spoke for a while. Every few minutes, Malik turned on the engine so they could get some heat, and the silence between engine starts was deeper than ordinary silence.

"I had blackouts," Lydia said. "Like, a lot of blackouts. I would lose hours at a time, no clue where I'd been or how I'd gotten here. I would just be in the middle of talking to people, or behind the wheel of a car in the middle of nowhere, with no clue. I worked at this high-powered sales office, we obliterated our targets. And everybody drank all the time. Pitchers of beer, of martinis, of margaritas. The pitcher was like the emblem of our solidarity. You couldn't turn the pitcher away, it would be like spitting on the team. We made so much money. And I had this girlfriend, Sara, with this amazing red hair, who I couldn't even talk to when we were sober. We would just lie in bed naked, with a bottle of tequila propped up between us. I knew it was just a matter of time before I did something really unforgivable during one of those blackouts. Especially after Sara decided to move out."