As Time Goes By Read online

  Never say it: that several Patrolmen could ride backward in time, lay hold on her with tractor beams and haul her free of the abyss. Or that I could tell her and my earlier self to beware. It did not happen, therefore it will not happen.

  It must not happen.

  For the past becomes in fact mutable, as soon as we on our machines have transformed it into our present. And if ever a mortal takes himself that power, where can the changing end? We start by saving a glad girl; we go on to save Lincoln, but somebody else tries to save the Confederate States—No, none less than God can be trusted with time. The Patrol exists to guard what is real. Its men may no more violate that faith than they may violate their own mothers.

  “I’m sorry,” Nomura mumbled.

  “It’s okay, Tom.”

  “No, I . . . I thought . . . when I saw her vanish, my first thought was that we could make up a party, ride back to that very instant and snatch her clear—”

  “A natural thought in a new man. Old habits of the mind die hard. The fact is, we did not. It’d scarcely have been authorized anyway. Too dangerous. We can ill afford to lose more. Certainly we can’t when the record shows that our rescue attempt would be foredoomed if we made it.”

  “Is there no way to get around that?”

  Everard sighed. “I can’t think of any. Make your peace with fate, Tom.” He hesitated. “Can I . . . can we do anything for you?”

  “No.” It came harsh out of Nomura’s throat. “Except leave me be for a while.”

  “Sure.” Everard rose. “You weren’t the only person who thought a lot of her,” he reminded, and left.

  When the door had closed behind him, the sound of the falls seemed to wax, grinding, grinding. Nomura stared at emptiness. The sun passed its apex and began to slide very slowly toward night.

  I should have gone after her myself, at once.

  And risked my life.

  Why not follow her into death, then?

  No. That’s senseless. Two deaths do not make a life. I couldn’t have saved her. I didn’t have the equipment or—The sane thing was to fetch help.

  Only the help was denied—whether by man or by fate hardly matters, does it?—and so she went down. The stream hurled her into the gulf, she had a moment’s terror before it smashed the awareness out of her, then at the bottom it crushed her, plucked her apart, strewed the pieces of her bones across the floor of a sea that I, a youngster, will sail upon one holiday, unknowing that there is a Time Patrol or ever was a Feliz. Oh, God, I want my dust down with hers, five and a half million years from this hour!

  A remote cannonade went through the air, a tremor through earth and floor. An undercut bank must have crumbled into the torrent. It was the kind of scene she would have loved to capture.

  “Would have?” Nomura yelled and surged from the chair. The ground still vibrated beneath him.

  “She will!”

  He ought to have consulted Everard, but feared—perhaps mistakenly, in his grief and his inexperience—that he would be refused permission and sent upstairs at once.

  He ought to have rested for several days, but feared that his manner would betray him. A stimulant pill must serve in place of nature.

  He ought to have checked out a tractor unit, not smuggled it into the locker on his vehicle.

  When he took the hopper forth, a Patrolman who saw asked where he was bound. “For a ride,” Nomura answered. The other nodded sympathetically. He might not suspect that a love had been lost, but the loss of a comrade was bad enough. Nomura was careful to get well over the northern horizon before he swung toward the seafall.

  Right and left, it reached farther than he could see. Here, more than halfway down that cliff of green glass, the very curve of the planet hid its ends from him. Then as he entered the spume clouds, whiteness enfolded him, roiling and stinging.

  His face shield stayed clear, but vision was ragged, upward along immensity. The helmet warded his hearing but could not stave off the storm which rattled his teeth and heart and skeleton. Winds whirled and smote, the carrier staggered, he must fight for every inch of control.

  And to find the exact second—

  Back and forth he leaped across time, reset the verniers, reflicked the main switch, glimpsed himself vague in the mists, and peered through them toward heaven; over and over, until abruptly he was then.

  Twin gleams far above . . . He saw the one strike and go under, go down, while the other darted around until soon it ran away. Its rider had not seen him, where he lurked in the chill salt mists. His presence was not on any damned record.

  He darted forward. Yet patience was upon him. He could cruise for a long piece of lifespan if need be, seeking the trice which would be his. The fear of death, even the knowing that she might be dead when he found her, were like half-remembered dreams. The elemental powers had taken him. He was a will that flew.

  He hovered within a yard of the water. Gusts tried to cast him into its grip, as they had done to her. He was ready for them, danced free, returned to peer—returned through time as well as space, so that a score of him searched along the fall in that span of seconds when Feliz might be alive.

  He paid his other selves no heed. They were merely stages he had gone through or must still go through.

  THERE!

  The dim dark shape tumbled past him, beneath the flood, on its way to destruction. He spun a control. A tractor beam locked onto the other machine. His reeled and went after it, unable to pull such a mass free of such a might.

  The tide nearly had him when help came. Two vehicles, three, four, all straining together, they hauled Feliz’s loose. She sagged horribly limp in her saddle harness. He didn’t go to her at once. First he went back those few blinks in time, and back, to be her rescuer and his own.

  When finally they were alone among fogs and furies, she freed and in his arms, he would have burnt a hole through the sky to get ashore where he could care for her. But she stirred, her eyes blinked open, after a minute she smiled at him. Then he wept.

  Beside them, the ocean roared onward.

  The sunset to which Nomura had leaped ahead was not on anybody’s record either. It turned the land golden. The falls must be afire with it. Their song resounded beneath the evening star.

  Feliz propped pillows against headboard, sat straighter in the bed where she was resting, and told Everard: “If you lay charges against him, that he broke regulations or whatever male stupidity you are thinking of, I’ll also quit your bloody Patrol.”

  “Oh, no.” The big man lifted a palm as if to fend off attack. “Please. You misunderstand. I only meant to say, we’re in a slightly awkward position.”

  “How?” Nomura demanded, from the chair in which he sat and held Feliz’s hand. “I wasn’t under any orders not to attempt this, was I? All right, agents are supposed to safeguard their own lives if possible, as being valuable to the corps. Well, doesn’t it follow that the salvaging of a life is worthwhile too?”

  “Yes. Sure.” Everard paced the floor. It thudded beneath his boots, above the drumbeat of the flood. “Nobody quarrels with success, even in a much tighter organization than ours. In fact, Tom, the initiative you showed today makes your future prospects look good, believe me.” A grin went lopsided around his pipestem. “As for an old soldier like myself, it’ll be forgiven that I was too ready to give up.” A flick of somberness: “I’ve seen so many lost beyond hope.”

  He stopped in his treading, confronted them both, and stated: “But we cannot have loose ends. The fact is, her unit does not list Feliz a Rach as returning, ever.”

  Their clasps tightened on each other.

  Everard gave him and her a smile—haunted, nevertheless a smile—before he continued: “Don’t get scared, though. Tom, earlier you wondered why we, we ordinary humans at least, don’t keep closer track of our people. Now do you see the reason?

  “Feliz a Rach never checked back into her original base. She may have visited her former home, of course, but we don’
t ask officially what agents do on their furloughs.” He drew breath. “As for the rest of her career, if she should want to transfer to a different headquarters and adopt a different name, why, any officer of sufficient rank could approve that. Me, for example.

  “We operate loose in the Patrol. We dare not do otherwise.”

  Nomura understood, and shivered.

  Feliz recalled him to the ordinary world. “But who might I become?” she wondered.

  He pounced on the cue. “Well,” he said, half in laughter and half in thunder, “how about Mrs. Thomas Nomura?”

  Triceratops Summer

  INTRODUCTION

  Here’s a summer memorable for more than the sudden appearance of a herd of triceratopsies, or whatever the plural is, with a comfortable relationship contrasted with a brand-new, more intense one. If it is better to have loved and lost than not have loved at all, how does having loved and lost and not having loved at all stack up?

  # # #

  Michael Swanwick has received the Hugo (six times), Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards for his work. His novel Stations of the Tide was honored with the Nebula Award and was also nominated for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. His short work, “The Edge of the World,” was awarded the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 1989. It was also nominated for both the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. “Radio Waves” received the World Fantasy Award in 1996. “The Very Pulse of the Machine” received the Hugo Award in 1999, as did “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” in 2000. His stories have appeared in Omni, Penthouse, Amazing Stories, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, High Times, New Dimensions, Starlight, Universe, Full Spectrum, Triquarterly and elsewhere. Many have been reprinted in best of the year anthologies, and translated for Japanese, Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, French and Croatian publications. His recent novels include Bones of the Earth, The Dragons of Babel, and Dancing with Bears. Another novel, Chasing the Phoenix, is forthcoming. His short fiction has been collected in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Moon Dogs, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures (a collection of short-shorts), The Dog Said Bow-Wow and The Best of Michael Swanwick. . He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter.

  Triceratops Summer

  by Michael Swanwick

  The dinosaurs looked all wobbly in the summer heat shimmering up from the pavement. There were about thirty of them, a small herd of what appeared to be Triceratops. They were crossing the road—don’t ask me why—so I downshifted and brought the truck to a halt, and waited.

  Waited and watched.

  They were interesting creatures, and surprisingly graceful for all their bulk. They picked their way delicately across the road, looking neither to the right nor the left. I was pretty sure I’d correctly identified them by now—they had those three horns on their faces. I used to be a kid. I’d owned the plastic models.

  My next-door neighbor, Gretta, who was sitting in the cab next to me with her eyes closed, said, “Why aren’t we moving?”

  “Dinosaurs in the road,” I said.

  She opened her eyes.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said.

  Then, before I could stop her, she leaned over and honked the horn, three times. Loud.

  As one, every Triceratops in the herd froze in its tracks, and swung its head around to face the truck.

  I practically fell over laughing.

  “What’s so goddamn funny?” Gretta wanted to know. But I could only point and shake my head helplessly, tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks.

  It was the frills. They were beyond garish. They were as bright as any circus poster, with red whorls and yellow slashes and electric orange diamonds—too many shapes and colors to catalog, and each one different. They looked like Chinese kites! Like butterflies with six-foot wingspans! Like Las Vegas on acid! And then, under those carnival-bright displays, the most stupid faces imaginable, blinking and gaping like brain-damaged cows. Oh, they were funny, all right, but if you couldn’t see that at a glance, you never were going to.

  Gretta was getting fairly steamed. She climbed down out of the cab and slammed the door behind her. At the sound, a couple of the Triceratops pissed themselves with excitement, and the lot shied away a step or two. Then they began huddling a little closer, to see what would happen next.

  Gretta hastily climbed back into the cab. “What are those bastards up to now?” she demanded irritably. She seemed to blame me for their behavior. Not that she could say so, considering she was in my truck and her BMW was still in the garage in South Burlington.

  “They’re curious,” I said. “Just stand still. Don’t move or make any noise, and after a bit they’ll lose interest and wander off.”

  “How do you know? You ever see anything like them before?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But I worked on a dairy farm when I was a young fella, thirty, forty years ago, and the behavior seems similar.”

  In fact, the Triceratops were already getting bored and starting to wander off again when a battered old Hyundai pulled wildly up beside us, and a skinny young man with the worst-combed hair I’d seen in a long time jumped out. They decided to stay and watch.

  The young man came running over to us, arms waving. I leaned out the window. “What’s the problem, son?”

  He was pretty bad upset. “There’s been an accident—an incident, I mean. At the Institute.” He was talking about the Institute for Advanced Physics, which was not all that far from here. It was government-funded and affiliated in some way I’d never been able to get straight with the University of Vermont. “The verge stabilizers failed and the meson-field inverted and vectorized. The congruence factors went to infinity and . . .” He seized control of himself. “You’re not supposed to see any of this.”

  “These things are yours, then?” I said. “So you’d know. They’re Triceratops, right?”

  “Triceratops horridus,” he said distractedly. I felt unreasonably pleased with myself. “For the most part. There might be a couple other species of Triceratops mixed in there as well. They’re like ducks in that regard. They’re not fussy about what company they keep.”

  Gretta shot out her wrist and glanced meaningfully at her watch. Like everything else she owned, it was expensive. She worked for a firm in Essex Junction that did systems analysis for companies that were considering downsizing. Her job was to find out exactly what everybody did and then tell the CEO who could be safely cut. “I’m losing money,” she grumbled.

  I ignored her.

  “Listen,” the kid said. “You’ve got to keep quiet about this. We can’t afford to have it get out. It has to be kept a secret.”

  “A secret?” On the far side of the herd, three cars had drawn up and stopped. Their passengers were standing in the road, gawking. A Ford Taurus pulled up behind us, and its driver rolled down his window for a better look. “You’re planning to keep a herd of dinosaurs secret? There must be dozens of these things.”

  “Hundreds,” he said despairingly. “They were migrating. The herd broke up after it came through. This is only a fragment of it.”

  “Then I don’t see how you’re going to keep this a secret. I mean, just look at them. They’re practically the size of tanks. People are bound to notice.”

  “My God, my God.”

  Somebody on the other side had a camera out and was taking pictures. I didn’t point this out to the young man.

  Gretta had been getting more and more impatient as the conversation proceeded. Now she climbed down out of the truck and said, “I can’t afford to waste any more time here. I’ve got work to do.”

  “Well, so do I, Gretta.”

  She snorted derisively. “Ripping out toilets, and nailing up sheet rock! Already, I’ve lost more money than you earn in a week.”

  She stuck out her hand at the young man. “Give me your car keys.”

  Dazed, the kid obeyed. Gretta climbed down, got in the Hyundai, and wheeled it around. “
I’ll have somebody return this to the Institute later today.”

  Then she was gone, off to find another route around the herd.

  She should have waited, because a minute later the beasts decided to leave, and in no time at all were nowhere to be seen. They’d be easy enough to find, though. They pretty much trampled everything flat in their wake.

  The kid shook himself, as if coming out of a trance. “Hey,” he said. “She took my car.”

  “Climb into the cab,” I said. “There’s a bar a ways up the road. I think you need a drink.”

  He said his name was Everett McCoughlan, and he clutched his glass like he would fall off the face of the Earth if he were to let go. It took a couple of whiskeys to get the full story out of him. Then I sat silent for a long time. I don’t mind admitting that what he’d said made me feel a little funny. “How long?” I asked at last.

  “Ten weeks, maybe three months, tops. No more.”

  I took a long swig of my soda water. (I’ve never been much of a drinker. Also, it was pretty early in the morning.) Then I told Everett that I’d be right back.

  I went out to the truck, and dug the cell phone out of the glove compartment.

  First I called home. Delia had already left for the bridal shop, and they didn’t like her getting personal calls at work, so I left a message saying that I loved her. Then I called Green Mountain Books. It wasn’t open yet, but Randy likes to come in early and he picked up the phone when he heard my voice on the machine. I asked him if he had anything on Triceratops. He said to hold on a minute, and then said yes, he had one copy of The Horned Dinosaurs by Peter Dodson. I told him I’d pick it up next time I was in town.

  Then I went back in the bar. Everett had just ordered a third whiskey, but I pried it out of his hand. “You’ve had enough of that,” I said. “Go home, take a nap. Maybe putter around in the garden.”

  “I don’t have my car,” he pointed out.