Time's Child Read online

  time’s child

  Rebecca Ore

  This is dedicated to the Net

  CONTENTS

  1 Benedetta Then and Again

  2 Live at the Archives

  3 Life in Leonardo’s Notebooks

  4 Biometric Illusions

  5 Not a God’s Hall

  6 System and Time

  7 A Future in Broad Daylight

  8 Seals & Photographs

  9 Boredom Attacks

  10 Back in the Time Track

  11 Brain Berserking Molecule by Molecule

  12 The Trickster and Friends

  13 Just Family

  14 A New Man of Now-time

  15 Wales in Secret

  16 A Future Takes Care of Mr. Wythe

  17 Time Changes Again

  18 A Real Tiny Dragon

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Rebecca Ore

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Benedetta Then and Again

  A Species of Afterlife

  An angel told Benedetta she was in Purgatory. Benedetta knew she wasn’t in Purgatory when she saw a scab on the angel’s knuckle. She didn’t believe she’d died, even though her body didn’t hurt as it should have from the wound she’d received. Benedetta was unsure what this afterlife was, but she was in her body and angels could be wounded. Perhaps this was a game of light and shadows, of things like puppets.

  “Confess what brought you to us, sister,” said the angel with the scab.

  “You say you’re the creature of the Lord?” Benedetta said, edging around the walls and feeling for a secret door to the room. Camera obscuras did something to have people on the wall behind the tiny round window. Only Benedetta didn’t see a tiny round window, just a mist at the top of the room. This was something like a camera obscura, Benedetta thought. They’d drugged her with opium or that Arab drug the Old Man of the Mountain used, or something. She was not dead. Angels didn’t have scabs on their knuckles. But perhaps she should play along if the angel had a good excuse for not knowing her history.

  “I’m not the Lord God Almighty, I’m just one of his servants who takes confessions in Purgatory from the unshrived.”

  Oh, that’s a good one. Benedetta smiled. “I was a young novice in a nunnery who was foully abducted by the French.”

  “That’s not the entire story,” the fake angel said. “You had been sexually active long enough to have had a child, and you were raped recently. And the man who died with you wasn’t your most recent lover.”

  “Why do you doubt me?” Benedetta asked, genuinely curious.

  “Because the Lord tells me you are lying.”

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  “That’s more how you sounded like when your soul was being brought to Purgatory. As you lay dying.”

  How do I get out of here? “So, I was kidnapped a couple of months earlier and ran away from those cruel French to the Lombardians.”

  “And I don’t believe the couple of months. Child, confess and save your eternal soul.”

  Benedetta wondered what the fake angel got out of lying to her. “Prove this is Purgatory and not Hell,” she said.

  “It would be better if you started telling us about life in the camps,” the fake angel said. Benedetta hadn’t felt any doors in her complete circling of the room. Maybe the fake angel got down on a rope from the area in the ceiling she couldn’t see for the smoke or mist or whatever. Mirrors, perhaps they obscured the openings with mirrors.

  Don’t panic. Benedetta didn’t want to tell the truth, because that’s what this creature wanted, and being trapped in a closed room with no windows and being told she was dead and in Purgatory made her angry. The anger warred with the panic and left her momentarily confused. “I went with the soldiers rather than be bored.”

  “I believe you, my child.”

  “So you want to jerk off while I tell you about the fucking I did?”

  “I’m an angel. I’m sexless.”

  “Let me kiss the fucking ring.” Benedetta grabbed his hand and bit down hard. If she hadn’t had her mouth occupied while he shrieked, she’d have told him that angels don’t feel pain, much less have scabs.

  Other people in weird clothes rushed through the walls, through the doors Benedetta hadn’t felt and couldn’t find, and grabbed her mouth at the jaw hinge. She spat out blood.

  “Why did you bite me?” the fake angel asked.

  “You have a scab on your knuckle. You can’t be an angel. Your lingua, your Lombardian, sucks. So, what the fuck is this place?” She expected she would die now, but the people holding her simply grabbed her legs and arms and held on. Something hissed against her arm and she thought snake before passing out.

  Not a snake, she thought when she woke up.

  The angel and a woman in strange clothes sat beside her bed. The woman said, “I know you’re not going to believe this either, but you’re in an archival facility in the future. Think of it as a library for people. I’m here to explain your legal standing in our culture.”

  Benedetta wondered how many layers of lies they’d try on her.

  The fake angel said, “We’re trying to learn about the past and we’d like you to help us.”

  The woman said, “We saved your life and brought you into the future. A lot of people are more comfortable if they think they died and are in an afterlife they can understand.”

  Maybe they aren’t lying? Benedetta thought this was all too crazy for anyone to try as a lie. Should she pretend to believe it until she could learn more, or just stay confused?

  “We’re sorry, but I don’t understand why you bit me,” the angel said. “Why so hard?”

  “You were lying to me. Well, thank you for saving me from dying. I can’t believe those French. I want out of here.”

  “We’d like to spare you the culture shock,” the woman said. Benedetta didn’t know how culture could cause shock.

  “We’ve saved your life,” the man said. “Not that we expect you to be immediately grateful, or to believe us. Yet. But can you begin to tell us honestly about your life. We really want to know what you saw, how you lived, what your customs were.”

  “I want to see the future first,” Benedetta said. Her heart was beating very fast.

  “You have the right to be treated as reasonably as possible. But I think you should wait,” the man said. “Your heart is beating very rapidly.”

  I’ve been trapped by magicians, Benedetta thought. “I couldn’t believe in Purgatory.”

  “Most people from the period of Christianity that had a concept of Purgatory as well as Heaven and Hell would find Purgatory believable. Nobody believes they are good enough for heaven—or at least they don’t argue about it. And people are relieved to find they’re not in Hell,” the man said. “I’m Joseph. You can call me Joe.”

  “But she isn’t sure where she is now, are you?” the woman said.

  “In a camera obscura,” Benedetta answered.

  “Well, sort of,” Joe said. “You probably want to get some rest and think about things for a while. All your friends are dead, in the past. If you believe us, this has to be a shock.”

  “What is the year?” Benedetta asked.

  “By the Christian calendar, 2308,” the woman said.

  “Eight hundred and fucking nine years from 1499,” Benedetta said. Benedetta realized she didn’t know how to get out of their archival room. What was the difference, 1499 or 2308? They were men and women, like other men and women. She would have to get to know them, then figure out who would bend the rules for her. Until then, she’d tell them as many stories as they’d believe.

  Joe asked, “You can do sub
traction in your head?” He sounded genuinely amazed.

  “Yeah, I can do subtraction in my head. You think I’m stupid because I’m a peasant girl?”

  “We would never have thought that,” Joe said. “It’s that we didn’t know women were taught to figure in your time.”

  “Oh,” Benedetta said. She decided not to tell them she could read, too.

  Raped, kicked, and left dying, she’d been brought to some fake purgatory run by creeps who’d out-clevered the Florentines with their toys of light. Purgatory wouldn’t have been a good fit. Hell was where Benedetta had expected to find herself on the days when she bothered to believe in an afterlife. Most of the time, she figured dead was dead, so up in the future could be better yet. Living in the future, if she could escape the forgeries of times past in these little rooms, would be another adventure.

  “I want to see this future.”

  “Your immune system can’t handle current diseases. Even immunizations to prevent the diseases might kill you. We can’t let you out that easily,” Joe said.

  “Explain that in words I know.”

  “Eight hundred years years isn’t genetically that large a spread,” the woman said, then spoke further in a strange language.

  “Look, I’m not stupid. Explain what an immune system is.” Benedetta spoke the words as well as she could remember them. The future people seemed surprised for some reason.

  “I can’t explain without you knowing more of our language. We have medicines to prevent diseases, for most of the deadly modern diseases. These are not without risks and while you can ask for them, you need to understand what the risks are. And it’s hard to explain any of this in archaic Italian.”

  I’m in prison, with better food, with people to talk to, and without beatings, but it’s still prison. “So teach me your language if that will help me understand better.”

  “What was it like being with the army?” Joe asked. “You were a camp follower, right?”

  “No, I wasn’t a common camp woman; I was on the artillery team with my husband.” She’d never married Emelio in the church, but they’d been together long enough.

  The people who’d saved and imprisoned her had another hasty conversation in their language, then Joe said, “Okay, we’ve suspected that the future could send people into the past just as we can move them out, so that is a possibility here, but there are accounts of women working on gun crews in Burgundy.”

  Benedetta shrugged. These people saved her life, but they weren’t interested in setting her free. She wondered what they’d do if she lied and said she was from the future. No, she’d tell them the truth until she had a better idea of what sort of mess she was in.

  Joe asked, “Where in Italy did you travel? What did you see? We’re interested in learning things about how people lived that didn’t get mentioned in the written records.”

  “We lived in Milan when we weren’t on jobs.”

  They talked among themselves. “Really. Can you show us on a map?” They brought in a map of the streets of Milan, some different than what she’d remembered, and it didn’t look like the map Leonardo drew. She found the old Sforza castle where Leonardo had lived, and found the little house near it, and said, “Some years, we lived there. And we visited one of the duke’s engineers there a lot.” She pointed to the old castle.

  The future people went nuts for a while in that strange language they were speaking.

  “Are you talking about meeting Leonardo di Vinci?”

  Yeah, I’m really from the past; I was really on an artillery crew; Leonardo really tried to seduce Emelio but thought I looked nice in mountain-girl clothes. Benedetta finally said, “Milan didn’t have that many first-class artillery crews, and Emelio was cute as well as bright. We spent a lot of time at Leonardo’s place. He even borrowed my kid for one of his experiments.”

  “I know someone who’d have so many questions for you,” Joe said. “Normally, the people we get didn’t know anyone historically significant in the old sense of historically significant.”

  “I will tell you what I know if I can get out of here.”

  Joe said, “Did you use forks for eating at the table and for what and what did they look like? Yeah, the information on Leonardo will excite some people, but what I’m most interested in is the daily life of the past, what wasn’t in books.”

  Benedetta remembered how weird forks has seemed when she first saw them at the table. “Saved on water, having your own fork to hold meat. And on fingers eating sticky things.” She wouldn’t tell them how embarrassed she’d been not knowing how to use a fork when she first saw one.

  But they were excited that she’d met Leonardo. Um, something to work with there. Man’s reputation lasted more than eight hundred years; Leonardo wouldn’t have been surprised, though.

  “If you see the future, it may corrupt what you remember of the past,” the woman said.

  “Did Leonardo’s drawing books get passed up to the future?” Benedetta asked.

  They chattered between themselves again, then said, “Yes, some of them.”

  “What is this culture shock you mentioned?”

  “Most people from the past would have mental difficulties if they tried to understand our times. Most of the more modern ones, and some of the most archaic ones, finally learn where and when they’re living now,” Joe said. “They’re happiest living in places that most resemble their own times. We try to keep them comfortable.”

  But they don’t live long was generally the rest of that statement in Benedetta’s natural lifetime. She wondered if people that had lived by the priests’ rules died of shock to find themselves neither in Heaven, Purgatory, or Hell, but in another life, sometime else. “But people from the past don’t live long?” Benedetta asked.

  The woman said, “You didn’t choose to come here, everyone you know is dead. Grief damages people.”

  Joe said, “She doesn’t even have a model for infection in the same way we know it.”

  “How we deal with transtemporals, people from other times, was invented by scholars of humankind for dealing with an American native survivor, Issi, at the beginning of the twentieth century. We provide shelter and give you appropriate technology, tools you’ll understand, and an afterlife that’s familiar to you.”

  “Do I belong to you people?” Benedetta asked.

  “The Philadelphia Archives has permission to bring noncitizens from the past and house them as long as they live,” the woman said.

  “So I belong to the Archives? What government is this?”

  “You don’t really belong to the Archives like a slave, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Joe said. “We just have permission to bring you uptime and are responsible for you.”

  “Things are very different beyond these rooms,” the woman said. “But you legally do have a right to ask us to let you out. I don’t advise it right away. We’re still responsible for your welfare. Our time will probably kill you. You’re in a biocontainment area now, you understand quarantine? Vaccinations might help or you could have a bad reaction to them.”

  How do cows figure into this? “How did you get me from Lombardy then to wherever I am now, in your time?”

  “We don’t know precisely how the engine works,” Joe said. “It appears to have come to us from the future, maybe as a jump start toward improving human genetic diversity, maybe for some amusement of the future’s. We’ve got people working on it. But I’m a history researcher, not a temporal physicist. What languages do you know?”

  “A number. I learn languages fast,” Benedetta said, seeing a way to make herself useful and to get out of the room they’d trapped her in. If Joe wasn’t lying, everyone Benedetta knew was dead now, over eight hundred years dead. And she didn’t want to be like a body to dissect, to these people.

  Joe and the woman talked their language at each other, then Joe said, “You’re probably not going to catch anything lethal from anyone brought here from before the plague era.
”

  “We had plague. If you keep clean…”

  “Different plagues,” the woman said. “Not carried by rat fleas. And they killed more than people.”

  In the next couple of days, they worked out that the present dialect was a distant variant of the English Benedetta knew from a couple of mercenaries in her day.

  Pinholes in Time

  The more the Time Team let Benedetta help them with other people from the past, the more Benedetta wanted to move into the future, but the Archives people kept refusing to let her out.

  However, this week, Joe, who seemed seducible but embarrassed to find himself male, headed the Time Team. He was probably in his early twenties, though age was harder to figure with these future people who didn’t dry themselves out with the sun or overwork themselves chasing armies. Joe said, “Not all people from all eras are as flexible as you are. Beyond that, I don’t know how your body would cope with the diseases we have now.”

  “I didn’t get the plague in my day.”

  Best not to remind him that I bit him the first day I saw him. Benedetta went to take a shower. One of the best things about the future was instant hot water. If she could find some people from the past who weren’t just idiots, she could…

  …bring in more idiots from the past. That shouldn’t be the plan, though. Not to bring in idiots, but to find people who needed a refuge from their own times, who would find the future a kinder place. She thought in the tongue her father spoke, German of some kind, then in the future English she was learning, then in the language she’d learned in the Lombardian hill village, the past and future wheeling around in images she saw with her mind’s eye: Leonardo’s drawings turned into real metal and fake wood, the past turned into drawings, and the maps changed, just as the maps changed for Benedetta’s father and mother.