Washington's Dirigible (The Timeline Wars, 2) Read online

  I didn’t worry about that. Nobody in my timeline was going to figure it out, and the Closers already knew who I worked for and where I was. If they wanted to try to come and get me, well, they’d had a shot or two at me before, and it hadn’t gotten them very far.

  There was a letter from Chrysamen every day, and I wrote back every day, too. The letters appeared and disappeared from the small safe in my office; sometime during the night a tiny crosstime port would automatically open. Outgoing mail would leave and incoming mail would arrive. For weeks there was just Chrysamen’s letter, and every other week a large paycheck in dollars (which I deposited locally) and an obscenely large paycheck in Swiss francs (which I mailed to a bank in Zurich, via a drop service in Amsterdam that looked like an art history journal).

  We talked about a lot—family and friends, how bored she was waiting in Hawaii to get her assignment, how we never quite had enough time to get to know each other. At least we were still in sync, one of her days corresponding to one of mine.

  One day Porter and I were coming back from the airport after a trip out of town. She had gone to St. Louis for a concert with the symphony there—and to demonstrate the three new instruments she had also acquired in less than a month’s time. Thanksgiving had been a few days before, and mostly we were talking about Christmas plans.

  “They won’t call you up just before the holiday, will they?” she asked.

  “They try not to do that to anyone. But I’m expecting to have to go in the first week of January or so.”

  She nodded. “There’s something I was going to talk to you about. I’ve been thinking I want to cut back on the concerts … there’s something I’d like to work on.”

  I nodded, being careful not to apply too much pressure, in case this was a momentary whim. “It’s very much your choice, Porter.”

  “I know. But I’m a little nervous, and I’d like to make the change while you’re here.”

  “Make what change?” I asked.

  “I’d like to work more on composition. Now that I understand so many instruments … well, I’m realizing part of the problem I’m having with not always liking what I play is that there isn’t much music written that’s really what I want to hear.” She turned a little sideways in the car seat, to face me more. “Do you think that will be okay? Are people going to get mad if I cut back on public appearances? And will it make the reporters come back?”

  “No way of telling, but I don’t think it will be a problem. Especially if you don’t cut it back to zero.” I shrugged. “You’re the one who knows anything about this, Porter. If you say you want to do, say, just a few concerts a year, and put more of your time into composition, I think mostly you’ll just get a very attentive hearing.”

  “Good.” She took a long pause. “And can I get my nose pierced?”

  “It’s your nose, kid.”

  I never did get used to that little lump of gold on the side of her nose, but I was as good a sport as I could manage. I even got her a tiny gold hoop for it for Christmas.

  Letters kept getting longer between Chrys and me. She finally got notified that she was being put in command of a standby combat team—ten people that would come in shooting when a big situation demanded major action. If you figured how many targets they could actually hit per minute, those ten people had greater firepower than one of our infantry divisions. But since it cost a lot, even by ATN standards, to move much mass back in time, they would probably not go at all during the year she would be assigned to the team. It was fundamentally a training command—the officer was at the top of her class, but the other fighters were at the bottom, people who were good enough to pull a trigger but had to be watched. She was bitterly disappointed.

  On January 3, I got my orders. I had two days for good-byes, and then I was off to the crosstime port in Manhattan; in the timeline where the mission was, I would be landing in colonial Boston, 1775.

  At least I figured I knew the basics of what would be going on.

  -5-

  “Excuse my asking, but what language is that?” The woman in the aisle seat looked kind and grandmotherly, but she was leaning way over the middle seat to look at the Crux Operations briefing I was reading. The flight to La Guardia is short, but some flights aren’t short enough.

  “I am your pardon please?” I replied.

  “What-a language-o is that?” she asked, very broadly and loudly. Some people believe that any foreigner will understand them if they just talk slowly and loudly enough.

  “Tilde umlaut?” I said brightly.

  She peered at me closely and then, with a slight click of the tongue, went back to her airline magazine. I got back into my briefing.

  I’d read it before, but you never know which little fact is going to turn out to be important, so you try to get as much of it into memory as you possibly can.

  The timeline I was going to was one deliberately created by ATN, one that would eventually (it was hoped) become a powerful and well-armed ally. Though crosstime travel was fairly cheap, if you went forward or backward in time, the cost went up enormously, so that when either the Closers or ATN started most new timelines, they usually did it by sending a single agent back in time to a crux, a period when things could have gone very differently.

  Even then, the agent had to work pretty hard. Timelines like to remerge with each other, so it’s generally only possible at a crux to get a new timeline started fast enough, and make it diverge far enough from its “parent” line, and at the crux you still have to do everything you can to make matters different. History can stay perfectly on track with slight discrepancies. (Ever find yourself arguing with someone about something you remember perfectly? A little micro-crux may have opened in your life at that point—and closed up afterward, leaving two people with slightly different memories.) Thus the new timeline not only has to be made different, it has to be made drastically different, or the timelines will reconverge, leaving nothing but puzzles for historians. Ever wonder about Pope Joan, Prester John, Atlantis, the Seven Cities of Cibola? Or why it’s so difficult to find cities like Camelot and Tarshish archaeologically? All of those, I suspect, were failed crux changes, either from ATN or Closer operations, or just maybe from other organizations or individuals that we don’t know about.

  Rey Luc, the Special Agent on the job, had really taken that lesson to heart. He had arrived in London, in the same timeline our history comes from, in 1738, as a man in his mid-twenties, and set up shop as a doctor, investor, and eccentric scientist. With some judicious use of antibiotics and nanos, he had achieved a reputation for miracle cures.

  In 1751, in our timeline, Frederick, the Prince of Wales, son of George II and father of George III, died after a brief illness caused by an abscessed injury. George II lasted till 1760, and was replaced by George III—the “Fat George” that the American colonies were to rebel against, “Mad George” who was to pose such a problem to British politicians during the Napoleonic age.

  Now, George III wasn’t a particularly stupid man; he was headstrong and had bad advice, and once he formed an opinion he tended to stay with it. He’d have fit in perfectly in the Johnson or Nixon White Houses as a staffer in charge of Vietnam policy. But he was generous and loyal to his friends, perhaps a bit too easily led in his younger years, maybe a little too easily manipulated—none of these needed to be fatal character flaws. His real tragedy was probably only that he came to the throne at the age of twenty-one, when he had many of the common failings of young men, and because there were few to tell him no, he never really outgrew them.

  Still, his record as king was mixed, not atrocious; Britain had worse monarchs as well as better ones, and there were many places where he showed some real talent for government.

  If his father had just lasted a few years longer—and his grandfather had lasted not quite so long—George III could have come to the throne as a mature, self-confident man. If he could have gotten a better education, instead of being spoiled by the tutors
his mother found for him (mostly for political reasons rather than their knowledge or wisdom), he might also have been a capable and effective person.

  So that was the first thing Rey Luc set out to change. He cured Frederick in 1751—probably just some penicillin would have done it, but it sounded as if he’d used the nanos to really fix the old guy up. He managed things one way or another (that’s a part of the job I’ll never get to like) so that within a year of that, George II died nine years early.

  (I’ve known many Special Agents, and that’s a part of the job they just won’t talk about. Usually it’s done with tailored viruses aimed at one particular individual to produce a sudden, painless death in sleep—their heart just shuts down. And of course when a historical figure is “erased”—the euphemism most of them use—he or she is still alive in the main time frame, so in a sense they are just killing one of the alternatives. But killing is killing, and most of them always feel a little sick about having to do it.)

  Frederick was a smart man, and an efficient king. He saw to the education of his son—and Rey Luc saw to it that it was a different education. Most fundamentally, Luc arranged to get a special tutor hired for the future George III, a man who would have been a good influence on anyone: Benjamin Franklin.

  When I hit that part I nearly choked with laughter. Franklin, of course, was already known in Europe by the time, and had made a good name for himself in a dozen ways; he was an obvious choice, and one could hardly imagine a better teacher for the young prince.

  Meanwhile, Rey Luc had not been idle in other areas, either. Britain and her American colonies in the 1700s were among the most progressive, forward-thinking, and innovative societies on Earth, but that was still only by eighteenth-century standards. Ideas developed very slowly by the standards of even 1850, and it wasn’t even very clearly understood that technological changes could make big differences in life.

  Through a dozen fronts and hidden organizations, Rey Luc set out to give technology a big push. Better steels were introduced, and cheaper ways of making them; the steam engine came along quickly. The Minié ball made breech-loading rifles possible and was an idea that could have been invented any time from the mid-1500s onward; in our timeline it took till almost the American Civil War, but Rey Luc had the British army equipped with breech-loading rifles at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War in 1754. By 1760, there were electric motors and generators (though they were crude), and by 1765 the first dirigibles were flying regular service in the Thirteen Colonies and around Britain.

  The Seven Years’ War wasn’t called that, because it had lasted just two; the better ships and cannon of the British Navy had swept the French from the seas, frontiersmen equipped with bolt-action rifles had chased the French and Indian forces back to Canada and taken every chunk of French land on the mainland, and on Christmas Day 1755, Paris had surrendered to British invaders. Thus instead of the Seven Years’ War (as Europeans call it in our timeline) or the French and Indian War (as we call it), it was known simply as the Conquest War. After some strategic purchases, it left Britain in possession of North America from the Nueces River and the Columbia River north, all of India, and great parts of France itself.

  In the aftermath of the war, the young George, as Prince of Wales, had taken an extended tour of the American colonies. He had visited Boston, Charleston, New York, and Baltimore. With Colonel George Washington as his guide, he had gone up the frontier road through Ticonderoga and Saratoga to Canada, come back via a ship across Lake Erie and through Fort Pitt, met town merchants, farmers, frontiersmen, and ordinary people, and been cheered wherever he went. In one of Luc’s reports he had noted, with justifiable pride, that in this timeline, George III was the most passionately pro-American person in Britain.

  Luc had been a busy little devil—all Special Agents starting timelines are—and he’d also managed to introduce the ideas of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the other early free-market economists more than a generation early; not that they were the last word, or that their solutions would work for all purposes, but by tying the British Empire together into a vast free-trade area, he had managed to create fast economic growth and the basic conditions for peace—merchants are not big fans of war, France was disarmed, Russia not yet a serious foe, Spain and Holland too weak to challenge Britain, and thus the whole world had a very small number of men at arms, and trade rather than war was the major activity.

  Last and not at all least, he was encouraging George to have a lot of kids, and maneuvering those kids onto every throne he could find—a step not unlike the one that Queen Victoria took naturally, a century later, in our timeline.

  The plan was that by 1800, there would be railways from Savannah to Quebec City and all over Britain, dirigible service across the Atlantic, and a British-controlled telegraph net from Rangoon to the American Pacific Northwest. By 1850, there would be airplanes, telephones, and a world federation of peoples built around the British royal family; and by 1900, human beings would be settling the Moon and Mars, ocean farming would abolish hunger, and the ATN would have a new powerful and prosperous ally.

  The one catch in all of those splendid plans was a great big one.

  After a routine report in 1771, detailing the first actions of King George since Frederick had died the year before, and explaining that he himself was going to go to Boston to move along the dawning railroad industry and push the movement to change the Empire into a Federation, Rey Luc had disappeared. There were no further reports and no word of any kind. Moreover, thus far ATN’s Time Scouts had been unable to find any of the descendants of the new timeline, which meant that it was still in a state of “chronflux”—whichever way it was going to go had not settled out, and there were at least some high probabilities that it wouldn’t go in the direction ATN had been aiming for.

  Time for a Crux Op, then. Chances were that Rey Luc had died, been taken sick, or otherwise gone off the case, and things had slipped in his absence. Another possibility was that matters had simply turned out to be very delicate indeed, and his communications were being lost in the chronflux—in which case the attempt to transmit me would get nowhere, and I’d be on vacation for another month.

  There was also, always, the possibility that the Closers had intervened, but normally that was a low probability—even though the two sides were at bitter war, time, with all its parallel tracks, is big. Agents only rarely ran into each other—most of the time ATN and Closers developed their own set of timelines without the other side even being aware of it. Of our million and a half timelines, the Closers knew about perhaps six thousand; of their two or three million, we knew of only ten thousand or so.

  This was a different case, though, because the Closers had taken such an interest in me. It was quite possible that they had found and invaded this time track, and they might well be there waiting for me in force.

  I sighed and put the briefings back in my case. The pilot was just announcing the approach to La Guardia; I had flown into it in another timeline where it was called Jimmy Walker, and in one where it was called Charles de Gaulle, but given the size of the flat patch in Queens, and the rarity of such in the city, if they had airplanes, there was usually an airport there. Moreover, it was usually a boring, routine place, and all the ones I had been to had been old and beat-up.

  The cab ride was dull, the city seemed drab in the gray January midafternoon, and nobody was around on the quiet floor of the midtown office building that was my destination. I used my key, walked in, checked my watch—half an hour to go—and went to the can, sitting down to read the briefings again. By now I figured I could even spot Rey in any wig, which was going to be important—his introduction of rayon had led to the spread of wigs down the social ladder (when they didn’t have to be made of human hair, and would stay white without powdering, they could be a lot cheaper). Rey would probably be wearing one, and there was no telling what the fashionable shape for them would be by the time I got there, so I needed to know his face in a
ny hair.

  When the portal opened, I was ready. I stepped through into a prep room—there was nothing to indicate the century or the timeline, it was just a white room with nothing in it except a table with the things I needed arranged on it. I picked up a backpack that held more supplies, a freshly charged and loaded NIF and SHAKK, and a large array of technical information in very small electronic storage (not just the Encyclopedia Britannica on a pinhead, but several of the great libraries of a variety of timelines in a container the size of a matchbox). I set my old SHAKK down on the table for the routine maintenance guys to pick up, changed quickly into a period outfit, and glanced through my trunk to make sure I had decent clothing for where I was going, indicated I was ready by saying so, and felt the world go abruptly dark, darker than it ever is except in a deep cave.

  Sound and weight disappeared together, and then the sense of having a body. A pale gray halftone light, even in all directions, swelled up around me, and the low rumble that always came at this point, and then the world began to swim into existence around me, first shapes and vague sounds, then colors and tones, and finally with detail and precision.

  I was in the upstairs room of the Quiet Woman tavern, on Arch Street, in Boston, April 1775. At least that part had gone right—by dropping a note with a couple of gold pieces into the local postal service, Crux Operations had set up the room for me. Well, it was the right place, there was no one here, and a note on the pillow of the small bed said that the owner hoped it was all in accord with my wishes. Thus far thus good.