Now, Then, and Everywhen (Chronos Origins) Read online

  On the one hand, I completely understand her outrage. The mistakes of that era were felt for generations. But the same can be said for many points in history.

  The next diary entry is more of the same. Different day, slightly different specific event that set her off, but pretty much identical points about what needed to be done. About people needing to wake up.

  And while I know she’s right, I find myself skimming through. Moving on to the next entry. The next rant.

  To be fair, they aren’t all that way. Occasionally, there are little flashes of light. Some comment about her family, something funny one of her kids did. A joke she heard, although many of those are political, too.

  The thing that’s truly annoying me, though, are the links and the little stars in the margins. It’s obvious that there’s more here, but I can’t access it. I dig out the little stylus from the spine of the diary and try again, but aside from the link or star slightly graying out when tapped, nothing happens.

  Of course, the information in those files could be just as opaque and barely relevant as what I’ve been reading. The links could just be photographs. Videos of her cat, if she had one. And I’m quite certain that at least some of them are political rants.

  But I think there’s more. Under the surface, there must be more. Otherwise, why would someone—possibly an older version of me—have bothered to hide these books away, sealed in a plastic container and tucked inside the wall of a swimming pool?

  FROM RECORDS OF THE HOUSE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE

  Written Testimony of Daniel N. Wagner (February 11, 1966)

  Mrs. Witte [Eloise Witte of Cincinnati, who claimed to be Grand Empress of the Ohio Klan] then told me that the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had hired a gunman for $25,000.00 to assassinate Martin Luther King, but the gunman had had feathers on his legs and could not accomplish this task so in turn had to give the money back. Mrs. Witte then said it appeared it was up to her to take care of King and if I were interested. I said I would accomplish this for a lesser amount of money.

  Mrs. Witte said she would take care of me financially and if I needed places to stay or any kind of support, she would see that I received it, but this assassination had to take place in Ohio. So Mrs. Witte set the date June 29, 1965, at Antioc Colledge [sic] in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Later this date was changed because King was to appear at the administration building at Antioc Colledge [sic] on the 19th of June 1965. Mrs. Witte asked if I wanted the assissitance [sic] of another 10 men, which she had appointed to help, and I said that that sounded better.

  We were suppose [sic] to drive up to the speaker stand, and those other ten men in 4 or 5 different cars would blast the crowd all around King, and I was to shoot king [sic] and be positively sure he was dead. Mrs. Witte said this would be a great achievement for the white race.

  This was cancealed [sic], or I was told about it earlier the week of the 19th of June, because Mrs. Witte couldn’t get it organized as well as the KKKK rally, which was supposed to take place on a farm at the same time. Mrs. Witte told me not to worry but that she would make sure I got another chance to get King.

  ∞13∞

  TYSON

  YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO

  JUNE 19, 1965

  If the flash of purple light from those CHRONOS keys hadn’t caught my eye, I don’t think I’d have noticed the movement behind them, on the roof of Antioch Hall. The man closest to the parking area raises his rifle. A moment later, the second man follows suit.

  There’s no way that I can reach King in time. The only thing I can do is yell out a warning to the others. Then I tackle Antoinette to the ground as shots ring out and the screaming begins.

  Dr. King staggers backward once, and then falls when a second bullet hits him. One of the bodyguards pulls Mrs. King behind a car. Another guard crouches in front of King and begins firing at the men on the roof. A man close to King is hit, and people are pushed onto the asphalt as the crowd rushes to get out of the line of fire. Their screams mix with the sound of shattering glass.

  This is wrong.

  All wrong.

  King wasn’t shot in 1965.

  Not yet. And not here.

  One of the two men on the roof catches a bullet to the arm. He loses his balance and tumbles from the building, his arms pinwheeling as he flies toward the ground. The other man on the roof is gone now. I don’t know if he was hit or if he retreated into the building.

  Or maybe he had a stable point up there? While I didn’t see a purple flash, I don’t know if I would have spotted the light from a CHRONOS key at this distance. I can definitely see the ones in the crowd, though. There are five—two men, two women, and a boy of maybe twelve, which strikes me as the oddest thing of all. Kids don’t go into the field. CHRONOS agents don’t bring their children to work. In fact, CHRONOS agents don’t even have children until their fieldwork is over.

  All five of the travelers are clustered toward the front. All are watching intently as the bodyguard rips off his suit jacket and presses it against the wound in Dr. King’s chest.

  Which means this isn’t an extraction team. If it was, they’d be looking for me. And they aren’t. They’re just watching.

  And then I feel a gut-wrenching nausea ten times worse than the one that hit me in the stupid exercise when CHRONOS made me go back and talk to myself. It doesn’t last long, but it leaves me certain that any efforts made to save King’s life will fail.

  No. It means they already have failed.

  I’m certain of it. Not just because I can see him there on the lawn, unmoving. Not just because of the panic on the faces of the people around me.

  I’ve also been hit with a massive double memory.

  On the one hand, I remember meeting Antoinette Robinson and her friends outside the drugstore. Watching her fold the piece of gum over twice and pop it into her mouth. I remember her saying she remembered me because I helped her father get their car going. Most of all, I remember getting hopelessly lost in her smile.

  And then there’s the other memory. It doesn’t exactly supplant the first one, but it’s just as vivid. Just as real. Antoinette was still outside the drugstore, with her sister and her friends. Same orange dress, but she’d lost weight, and it hung oddly on her now. This time, she remembered me because I’m the guy who pushed her out of the line of fire. This time, she said I was there on the day Dr. King was killed. This time, there was no bright smile, and she clutched my arm frantically, asking me why everything changed. She said something about the Selma march, too, but I didn’t catch it before her friends pulled her into the car and they drove away.

  This is not good. This is so very not good.

  Antoinette stirs beneath my chest. I manage to get to my knees, one of which stings sharply when it touches the ground. Since I still don’t trust myself to stand, I just shift my weight a bit to the other knee and move aside.

  “Are you okay?” I ask. “I heard the shots and just reacted. I’m sorry if I . . .”

  She pushes herself up to sitting, but her eyes don’t meet mine. They’re fixed in horror on the car behind me. I follow her gaze and see that the rear windshield is shattered from the gunfire.

  “Something happened,” she says. “I felt it. Something—”

  “Toni?” Her mother shoves past the people between us, panic in her voice. “Oh, my God, Toni! Were you hit?”

  I manage to stand and reach a hand down to help Toni to her feet. She looks as faint as I feel.

  “No. No, Mama. I’m okay. But I probably wouldn’t have been if this guy hadn’t pushed me down.” She points toward the car directly behind us.

  Mrs. Robinson’s eyes grow wide as she takes in the windshield. Then she pulls me into a hug so tight I can barely breathe.

  “You saved her life. Thank you, thank you so much.”

  I’m almost certain that something I’ve done is the only reason her daughter was ever in danger. But I can’t really go into that, so I just smile back, first at he
r, and then at Toni’s dad and sisters who have now joined us.

  Her dad introduces himself and shakes my hand absently, glancing over his shoulder at the chaos surrounding Dr. King. “That was quick thinking.”

  “Something happened,” Toni repeats, staring at me. “What was that?”

  The smile freezes on my face and slowly fades as I realize why she was so frantic in my second memory of the drugstore. My CHRONOS key is where I always keep it—on a chain attached to the inside of my jacket pocket. Toni would have been almost as close to it as I was when the time shift happened. That shouldn’t be a problem, though, once the physical effects fade. She has no way of knowing that King is supposed to live for three more years.

  “It’s Reverend King, sweetie,” her father says. “Someone shot him.”

  Toni nods. “I know. It’s horrible. But . . . there was something else. Not just the guns. I felt it here.” She presses her hand against her stomach. “And it’s more than that. I just know it is. I know something is wrong. Something changed.”

  “We hit the ground pretty hard,” I tell her. “I might have knocked the wind out of you.”

  She narrows her eyes. I think she can tell I’m hiding something.

  “Maybe you hit your head, baby,” her mom says. “Let’s get you to the car so you can sit down.”

  “I didn’t hit my head.” Toni grabs my arm. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? Selma. What happened in Selma? Why did those people die?”

  Sirens drown out the last part of her question, keeping me from having to say anything else. One of the police officers must have called for an ambulance. We all take several steps back to make room for it, and Toni’s mother pulls her away.

  An officer calls out to the crowd, telling everyone to stay put because they need to get witness statements. But I have to get back to the stable point. As much as I’m dreading the reception I’ll get when I return, we need to find out what happened.

  We need to fix it.

  Yes, it’s only three years. I allow myself to hope that the changes were minimal, but I know better. That kick to the gut I felt wasn’t some minor quiver in the timeline. It was more like an earthquake.

  I inch my way to the right, behind the car with the shattered windshield. Toni’s mom is now leading her daughter to their car, the car that I’m supposed to help get started, but that history seems to have been overwritten. My feet hit the path that leads to the stable point a few seconds after Antoinette slides into the back seat. I turn and hurry down the path, glancing back over my shoulder to see if anyone is following me, since I’m clearly disobeying the officer’s order to stick around for questioning.

  No one is following me. But when I look back one last time, Antoinette Robinson’s frantic eyes lock onto mine.

  I try to send her a silent message. I’m going to fix this. I have no clue what I did to cause the change, but CHRONOS will help me fix it. Like Richard said. And when the timeline is back to normal, Toni will be back to normal, too.

  FROM THE LIVERPOOL DAILY POST (JULY 5, 1957)

  The annual Crowning of Rose Queen and Garden Fete will be held tomorrow at Woolton Parish. A procession will begin at 2 p.m., with the opening ceremony by Dr. Thelwall Jones at 3 p.m. in the churchyard. Entertainments include a demonstration by Liverpool police dogs, numerous sideshows, a dress parade, and refreshments.

  In the evening, a Grand Dance will be held in the church hall, with performances by the George Edwards Band and the Quarry Men Skiffle Group.

  All proceeds benefit the parish charity fund.

  ∞14∞

  MADI

  NEAR LIVERPOOL, UK

  NOVEMBER 12, 2136

  I step out of the shadows, tap my comm-band, and page a Dryft to carry me to London. The wait is seven minutes, so I pace around the churchyard, which is mostly grass and (in this decade, at least) carefully trimmed hedges.

  This church—Saint Peter’s, in Woolton, near Liverpool—is nearly 250 years old. It’s also the only stable point in the United Kingdom on this key. It’s listed as viable from 1888 to 2150, and it’s my cheapest travel alternative for having a face-to-face conversation with my mother in London and my grandmother in Dublin.

  The main building of Saint Peter’s hasn’t changed much over the centuries. Like most religious buildings from the period, it has its share of buttresses, turrets, parapets, and pinnacles. There are even a few gargoyles sprinkled about, and something called a lych-gate at the entrance to the churchyard. The gravestones that dotted the lawn in the earlier centuries are mostly gone now. Only a few, presumably with historical significance, remain.

  On the date that was locked into the key for this location—July 6, 1957—the hedges were less carefully tended, and one pointy leaf scratched my cheek a few millimeters below my eye. Back then, headstones took up much of the lawn. Some were relatively new, and others tilted at odd angles, as though they were tired of standing sentry over the bodies beneath them.

  This church was the very first location I visited on purpose after finding the CHRONOS medallion. I was so nervous that I simply peeked out from the alcove that hides the stable point long enough to realize that, yes, I had indeed traveled back to 1957, or at least to some point in the mid-twentieth century, based on the houses I could see beyond the church walls and the vehicles parked along the street. After briefly considering stepping out of my cubbyhole to explore the place, I realized my clothes were a bit too risqué for the 1950s. So, I chickened out and blinked back to the safety of my garden in 2136.

  I’m more confident now, however, and once I finish the unpleasant business of asking Mom and Nora about this whole genetic-enhancement issue, I may treat myself to a little historical tourism. The 1930s dress currently in my bag is old-fashioned for 1957, and it will probably raise a few eyebrows, but it won’t get me tossed into jail for indecent exposure. The shorts and T-shirt I’m wearing right now probably would.

  I’m not really all that hyped about visiting 1957. I can’t say that it looked all that interesting from the brief glimpse I got. It’s mostly just idle curiosity about what made this location important enough to merit a stable point. And I’m also hoping for some clues about the historian who owned this CHRONOS key. Not a name or anything like that. I doubt I’ll find an etching on a wall inside the 1957 version of this church that proclaims Jane Doe was here from the future. But maybe I can learn something about his or her interests. I’m not sure how that will help me, but I can’t help feeling a certain kinship with whoever used the key before me.

  Not a literal kinship, though. I’m quite certain it didn’t belong to Katherine Shaw. I’ve spent the past two days alternating between the diaries that were stashed inside the pool light, and her specialty definitely wasn’t music history. She and her partner did visit a club in Chicago to listen to a pianist named Scott Joplin on one of their trips to the 1893 World’s Fair—a destination Katherine visited frequently, judging from the entries in the diary—and if my suspicions about those file links are accurate, they also obtained a recording of that performance. Most of her work, however, seems to have centered on civil rights movements, especially for women. She discusses the suffrage movement in the US and Great Britain in her diary, and also several religious groups that ordained women, as well as abolitionists. But Scott Joplin, who played an upbeat style called ragtime, was the only musical performer mentioned in the entire diary. And with the exception of the odd underwater stable point, all of the locations on this key seem to be music related.

  I put this jump off for a day, trying to glean a bit more information from the diaries. I’m still nowhere near finished with either of them, however. These little books may be thin to the casual observer, but each page holds several months’ worth of entries, and neither of the two diarists was one to skimp on words. I just keep feeling like I’m missing something, though. I’m really tempted to set up a stable point down in the basement and scan through to find out exactly who hid these for me to f
ind. And when I find that person—regardless of whether it’s one of my progenitors or a future version of myself—I’m going to smack them a good one for being so fucking cryptic. Why not just leave me a letter or a video and say “Here is every single thing you need to know”? With bullet points, preferably, and a nice, concise summary at the end.

  But no. Instead, I’m stuck wading through rants and reports about Spanish royalty visiting the World’s Fair.

  When I grew tired of reading, I continued my search through the cabinets in the library; I also found an odd device Jarvis identified as a thumb drive, which was once used to hold data, and several other diaries. One of them had an embossed title on the front—Book of Prophecy—but it must have been someone’s idea of a joke, because the entire volume was blank.

  In addition to those efforts, I spent a few hours yesterday afternoon helping Lorena and RJ move their things from the small apartment they’ve been sharing with Lorena’s brother and his wife for the past few months. The wife could hardly conceal her glee when we arrived with the rental truck, and Lorena made several snippy comments as we were leaving, so I think I understand why they were eager to take me up on my offer of a place to stay.

  Jack and Alex still have six weeks left on their lease, but both of them packed a bag and claimed a bedroom. My place is closer to campus, and it doesn’t smell like old gym socks. Alex brought in a new computer system last night, which I suspect maxed out his credits and sent him into debt, along with several odd devices stamped Temporal Physics Lab, which I suspect he doesn’t have official permission to borrow. He’s turned about half of the library into his own personal lab. I just wish he didn’t have the habit of singing out loud to whatever he’s listening to while he works. The guy can’t carry a tune to save his life. It’s also a little disconcerting to try to work on that side of the library, so it’s a good thing the place is huge. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him working with fewer than six holoscreens open. He sits in the middle, with the screens surrounding him. It’s like he’s in a data cave. Some of the screens show text or charts, but quite a few just look like weird blobs to me. I don’t ask questions, though. Alex is the sweetest guy in the world when he’s not engaged in something but seems a little prickly about his work process. And he clearly doesn’t like to be interrupted.