Timeshadow 03

The temperature had fallen into the low-80s, and Judy Aronson was cold. She zipped up her flight jacket and crossed her arms protectively while she and the rest of Beagle Group walked past their helicopters on their way to the old Mission. The air was pregnant with wild scent: trees she'd never known existed, wildflowers cloaked in fragrant kaleidoscopes and wild game cooking over wood fires. She'd known nothing but stale, air conditioned air for the last three years, air spiced with subtle textures of industrial solvents and hydraulic fluid. She watched as children played on dusty, red sand paths, a dog chasing a little boy here, a rooster chasing a cat over there, adobe-walled dwellings everywhere she looked, the white stone walls of the mission standing in subtle contrast, and she found herself wondering what it must be like to come of age in such a place.

Travis and Crockett were waiting for them just outside the walls of the mission; Travis looked careworn and anxious, Crockett like he was in on the joke. As Aronson drew near, Crockett stepped forward and offered her his arm; annoyed but not knowing what else to do, she took it and smiled in spite of herself when she saw the warmth in his eyes.

Travis led the group to a small courtyard off the main building. She saw venison and goat roasting over open flames, corn and potatoes, and onions too, cooking on flat rocks near the flames. There were yellow candles on weathered tables, torches glowing on iron pikes along the rough stone walls, while an old man sitting in a chair hunched over a guitar by one of the fires played slowly, soulfully, and Aronson felt a sudden affinity for this simple way of life. Life was slower here, she felt, lives seemed to flow at a slower pace, like the breeze she felt flowing through the trees overhead. She felt Crockett's arm, too, entwined in her own and felt connected to this place all the more; she thought of the children playing outside and understood life was life, no matter where you were, no matter what your home looked like. Happiness is where you find it, she heard herself thinking...wherever you are. Whenever that happens to be. She looked at Crockett, looked at the warmth in his eyes, listened to his easy-going humor, and she wondered what it would be like to live here...to love here.

"I'm sorry we couldn't put on a better dinner," Colonel Travis said, "but our supplies are running low. I'm sure as soon as Colonel Fannin arrives..."

"He won't come," Higgins said. "Fannin will leave Goliad on the 26th with about three hundred men, but history says he stopped after a mile and returned to the fort."

Travis looked down at the ground, rubbed a little patch of dirt with his boot for a moment. "Well, then. I suppose we'll make do tonight," he said with a quick, if vacant smile. "Perhaps tomorrow morning we can go for a hunt."

"I could go," Crockett said hopefully. "I can fetch him, bring supplies."

"What's the point," Travis sighed. "If the Lieutenant and her 'Apaches' do what she says they can, the war will be over a few minutes after it starts, then we ride east, find Houston and give him the good news."

"True," Crockett said. "Yes indeed. Why bother." He turned to Aronson. "I have whiskey, and I have bourbon. Which shall you have?"

"Water, I think, if you don't mind."

"I do mind. Never after sunset, and never with a beautiful woman."

"Never before flying," Aronson said, trying to smile. "On the other hand, I don't think we're flying tomorrow, so why not?"

"That's the spirit." He poured two fingers in a chipped crock mug, then one for himself. "So, where are you from? Not Tennessee, surely?"

"No. Oregon. Astoria, Oregon, but you've never heard of it, have you? It doesn't exist yet," she said, and she had to catch herself. Suddenly she felt like crying, not because her mother and brothers were dead, but because they had never even existed...not yet, anyway.

"It must be very difficult," Crockett said, watching her eyes. "My wife, Elizabeth, was a widow, and my first wife passed very young, too. Loss seems an unavoidable part of our journey, but this journey...the one you're on? I fear it has no precedent. I can't even imagine what you must feel? If you live out your days here, what would come of your memories?"

"I was thinking about that earlier today. About home. A home that doesn't exist yet. My mother, who hasn't been born yet, and who may never be born. Lives that have been lived, yet they may never be lived. How could this happen? Who would do such a thing?"

"I would love to know the future," Crockett said wistfully. "All our mysteries come to life, so many questions answered."

"You know, when I studied history about the only thing I thought about was that it was nothing but a progression of wars. White men fighting war after war. About technology leading to ever more efficient ways of killing people..."

"And so of course you became a soldier?"

"It's difficult to explain. There are very few opportunities for people today, well, you know what I mean. Opportunities for people other than in the military or law enforcement. It's either that or you work for a corporation that makes hardware for the military."

"Are wars so common?"

"Yes, and no. The real problem, David, is that resources like water and arable land have become so scarce, the weather so inhospitable. In most parts of the world, for almost the last ten years, the leading cause of death is suicide..." She fell quiet as visions of her world came flooding in, as memories of shortages and riots replaced the reality of this simple courtyard, this wondrously simple, unspoiled life.

"I'm so sorry I brought it up again."

"How could you know. I mean, how could anyone living today ever expect what all this leads to. I look around and it all seems so perfect..."

"I guess it is, Judy, but then again, I love Texas. That's why I'm moving my family here, but as different as this must look to you, in it's own way life here is still a struggle too. Life will always be a struggle, I assume. I think it must be. Without struggle, what would we become? Complacent? Consumed with irrelevancies, forgetting about what's most important in life?"

"Tell me about your wife."

"Elizabeth? I don't know where to start."

"You love her, I assume? Is that a good place to start?"

"Of course, yes, very much. And I miss her terribly."

"You said you have daughters?"

"Yes," he chuckled, "two boys and a girl with my first wife, two girls and a boy with Elizabeth. What about you?"

"No, no children," she said evasively. "I never saw the point, I guess, with where the world is headed."

He looked at her for the longest time, and she could see something beyond sympathy in his eyes, something final and enduring. "I'm sorry," he said again. "I keep forgetting."

"I don't know why you feel the need to apologize?"

"Because I think I feel a sorrow, a sorrow I've never known could exist. Actually, I think it feels like grief, like grieving, but not for any one person. When I think upon what you've told me the future holds, it feels like I've lost my own children. And their children. Like my children lost their way in the woods, and they're gone now."

"Are you hungry?" she said, desperately wanting to change the subject.

"Yes, of course. Let's find some food..."

They sat under a live-oak tree and ate in silence, Travis doing most of the talking until Colonel Bowie appeared. Pale and feverish, he was introduced to Aronson, with Higgins and Travis close by. He made a few pleasantries then asked the group's pardon as he retired to his room; Higgins came and sat by Aronson as he watched Bowie disappear, then he came right to the point.

"I don't know if it's TB or pneumonia, but we have antibiotics on hand that would take care of either one. You want me to talk to him?"

Aronson looked at Higgins and shrugged; Crockett wanted to know what antibiotics were. Higgins pulled out a cardboard blister-pak of pills from his jacket and held them up. "There are five pills on this," Higgins said. "You take one a day. My guess is whatever is ailing Bowie will be cured by these pills within a week. My question to the Lieutenant is an ethical one, I guess. As we're changing history on a strategic level, should we change it again on a more personal level. Give Bowie the medicine, or not."

"That hardly seems a question to me," Crockett said. "If you have the means to make someone well, why wouldn't you?"

"Because we're changing history again," Higgins explained. "If we remove the Mexican threat, well, in that case everyone here lives. Except, I guess, Colonel Bowie, because of his illness. Unless we give him the medicine, and then he lives too."

"I still don't see the problem." Crockett scowled as he looked at Aronson.

But Aronson only shrugged. "Not sure any of us should be playing God, you know, but go ahead. Ask him. See what he wants to do."

Higgins shrugged too. "Sure thing, Lieutenant," he said as he walked off after Bowie.

"Everything we do here is going to be wrong, one way or another," she said to no one in particular.

"So, you're saying Time as it's recorded in History is 'right', that's the natural order of things?"

"That's what it feels like to me, yes. What we plan to do is break the natural order."

"But you'll save everyone's life here."

"And we'll kill thousands of Mexican soldiers who wouldn't otherwise be killed. I just don't see how that changes things."

"How could we," Patty McKaig said, joining the conversation, "when we just don't have enough information to go on."

"So you keep saying," Crockett said as he looked at McKaig – and smiled. "Why's that so important?"

"Because we don't know motives. The motives of whoever put us here. Are they good motives, as we seem to think they are? Motives that truly have the best interests of humanity at heart? What if they're not? What if we unleash a series of events that accelerates collapse? But that's only one part of the problem. Not only do we not know any motives, we also have no idea what the outcomes of our actions might be. We're planning to act because we assume pure motives on the part of whoever put us here in the first place, but I think that's a dangerous assumption. Second, we know one set of outcomes already, if we haven't corrupted that already. That known future, the one we know and came from, may not be optimal, but at least we know where it leads."

"Facts and circumstances," Crockett said. "Remember?"

"Okay," McKaig replied, "we know nothing, really, about either. We know zero facts about 'them' – whoever they are. Circumstances? We're here. That's all we know. We assume this is a pivotal moment, but is it? Really? Maybe..."

"Maybe David returns to Washington, runs for president and wins," Aronson said, grinning.

"But that's my point, precisely," McKaig scowled. "After we intervene, we can no longer make any assumptions about the future. None!"

"If that's true," Crockett mused, now deep in thought, "then we've missed something. If someone was smart enough to bring you here, why would they leave the outcome to chance? That just doesn't make sense."

"Unless they don't care about any particular outcome." Aronson said as she looked at McKaig. "We've missed something. Something important, haven't we?"

+++++

Jim Sutter and Tom Foreman stood in the precinct's watch commander's office, Sutter looking down at photographs of an apartment on the lieutenant's desk. He was tired, almost asleep on his feet, and hadn't left the precinct since he'd come in after the encounter on Park Avenue seven hours earlier. Now "someone from Washington" was in the office too, looking at the video from his phone. At least, that was the rumor he'd heard before he was summoned to the lieutenant's office. Sutter had never seen this stranger around the precinct before, but now, as Sutter watched the expression on the man's face, he wondered just what the hell was going on.

"You say you heard something? When this sphere was hovering outside the building," the stranger asked.

"Like an electro-static hum," Sutter said, nodding his head. "Very faint."

"And then it, the sphere, just went up into the clouds? Was it snowing then?"

"No sir. It seemed to get cold first, as the sphere rose, then it started snowing."

"Did you notice anything else? When this was going on, when it started snowing?"

"Sir?"

"Look at your video again," the stranger said, pointing at the wall, "but ignore the sphere. Look at the sky, and the other buildings down Park Avenue," the stranger said as he hit the play button.

The image came alive on the wall screen, the blue sphere hovering outside the 100 story tall apartment tower. Sutter ignored the sphere as best he could, then he noticed stars in the sky and he remembered it had been a clear night, but not that clear. He'd never seen so many stars in the night sky, and the view was stunning – but as suddenly the sky was opaque. The sky changed in an instant and was now full of clouds, then buildings along Park Avenue began to fade away, like they had been erased... And just as suddenly they reappeared – just as the sphere disappeared – and as the snow started falling.

Sutter stood, mouth agape, as the video was played and replayed. "I never saw that," he said. "I was too focused on the sphere."

"Understandable," the stranger said. "The same thing happened to me too. The question that comes to mind now, Jim, is did you feel anything unusual while this was going on? I mean physically?"

Sutter tried to think back, but all he could recall was shock, then a brief moment of fear when someone yelled it was time to get the motorcade moving. "No sir, not really."

"The video shows something inside the sphere. Does that look like a person to you?"

"That's the impression I had when I was looking at it, yes sir. It felt like someone was looking at me, trying to tell me something."

The stranger looked at the watch commander, who nodded his head. "Jim," the lieutenant said, "is there any chance you've met someone named Patricia Hahnemann before...or that you, perhaps, know a woman by that name?"

"Patricia Hahnemann? No sir, never, not that I know of."

"Jim, this is Tom Foreman, from CID, and Jon Gray," the lieutenant said, making introductions. "He's from, well, an agency in Washington. Tom was the first person to enter the apartment. The apartment the sphere left, and the place belongs to one Patricia Hahnemann. Have you ever just heard her name before, anywhere, or know anything about her? Anything at all?"

"No sir. Nothing comes to mind."

"Well Jim, when Tom searched the apartment this morning he found this," 'Mr Gray' said, handing him a piece of paper.

Jim Sutter stared in shock at the photograph he'd been handed. He was standing between two middle-aged women, a man wearing an NYU sweatshirt stood to one side, with a much older man beside that man. The older man was bearded, and looked like some sort of comic book wizard. A very young girl, who for some reason struck him as being blind, stood in front of him, and he had his hand on the girl's shoulder. In the background? A city. It looked vaguely familiar, but very strange, like maybe something from Disney World...and he looked up at the stranger, this 'Mr Gray', and the watch commander, now completely confused.

He shrugged, shook his head. "I don't know anyone in this picture, sir. And wherever this was taken, I've never been there. It must be a fake, sir."

"Look at the streets," Gray said.

"What are those? Horse-drawn carts?" Sutter said, his confusion growing.

"Yup," Gray said. "That's Florence, Italy. The woman on your right is Hahnemann; we haven't identified the man in the sweatshirt or the little girl yet, but the other woman is, we think, Hahnemann's sister, Sara Goodman. We've run all the people in the image through all facial recognition databases, and the older man has been identified as Galileo, if that makes any sense at all, based on portraits in museums."

"Does he live in Florence," Foreman said, "this Galileo dude?"

"At some point he did, yes," Gray said, shaking his head, "other times in Pisa. What disturbs me is the street traffic. No modern vehicular traffic of any sort, no cars, no trucks, not even a bicycle. The scene looks medieval, even the wood scaffolding on part of the campanile. So, what this photograph implies is that you, and it seems these other people too, have been in Florence, Italy – about 400 years ago. And as you have no memory of the event, the logical conclusion is that, for you anyway, this hasn't happened yet."

"400 years ago!?" Foreman yelled.

"Do either of you know who Galileo was?"

Foreman shook his head.

"I do," Sutter said. "An astronomer, persecuted by the church."

"That's right," Gray said. "In the 1600s. So what are you and this Hahnemann woman doing in Florence, 400 years ago?"

"It's just not possible," the lieutenant said. "It's got to be a fake!"

"And the sphere? That a fake too?" An argument broke out, both men facing off and shouting at one another, and Foreman backed off, expecting the worst.

"Excuse me," Sutter said, trying to break in. "But where did the photo come from?"

Foreman looked at Gray, who shrugged and looked away. "Jim," the lieutenant said, "the image was on her phone. Hahnemann's phone."

"Okay," Sutter said. "Who sent it to her?"

Gray turned around and looked at Foreman again, then at Sutter. "You did, Jim," Gray said. "Two weeks from tomorrow."

+++++

Patty McKaig looked at Crockett and Aronson sitting together by the fire and she almost had to laugh. He was flirting with her, she saw, and suddenly the idea was almost overwhelmingly hilarious. Judy Aronson was about as far from being a heterosexual female as you could find, and Crockett just hadn't picked up the signals. Still, she thought, why would he – indeed, how could he see the signs any 21st century woman put out? But why Aronson? She was taller than he, built like a linebacker and by all accounts a hell of a lot meaner too, and while she'd been flying for three years, she'd also gone to Ranger school. She was a tough customer, so maybe he'd been attracted to that, but at one point Crockett put his hand on her thigh and McKaig almost laughed when Aronson slid away from him. Poor guy! He picked up on that, however, and right away, too...

Then Aronson stood and walked over to her.

"What's with this guy," Aronson said when she got to McKaig's side.

"He's horny, Judy. Higgins told me he's been away from his wife for over a year...so cut him some slack! He's probably about to explode..."

"Look, I don't want to...you know what I mean?"

"So don't. Look Judy, the guy probably doesn't even know what a lesbian is, and even if he does, it wasn't something people went around advertising 200 years ago. You may be the first one he's ever met..."

"Geesh. Why me?"

"I guess you don't even want to throw him a mercy fuck?"

"No fucking way. He smells like a goat, and it looks like he's never brushed his teeth. I mean, never."

"Different world, Judy. It's a different world. So, would you mind if I gave it a shot?"

Aronson looked at McKaig incredulously. "Really? Would you?"

"Well, you know what Judy? Turns out I'm just a little bit horny too, and remember what the song says...you gotta love the one you're with."

"You and that ancient crap. Well, knock yourself out."

McKaig walked over and sat down beside Crockett. "Got any more whiskey," she said.

"Sure," he said, looking up, "but you'll have to share my cup."

"Not a problem, Amigo."

"You speak Mexican?"

"Pocito."

He laughed. "Yeah? Me too. What's with the lieutenant? She seems...shy?"

"She's involved with someone else, I think."

"Serious?"