Time

Reeve was visibly tired, stressed-out, baffled, angry. “Representative, she’s a child. And you’re letting her give you orders.”

“We nearly allowed her to be killed, Principal,” Maura said gently. “I think she has a right to a little control over the situation. Don’t you?”

Reeve shook her head, furious. But she left, slamming the door behind her.

Anna showed no reaction.

Maura said, “We’re going to sit down, Anna. All right? In these two chairs, on this side of the desk. You can sit, or stand, whatever you want.”

Anna nodded, and Dan and Maura sat down.

Anna said, “Would you like a drink?”

Maura was surprised. “I — yes. Yes, please.”

Anna crossed to the water cooler, neatly extracted two paper cups, walked gracefully around the table and handed them to Dan and Maura.

“Thank you,” Maura said, sipping the water. It was warm, a little stale. “Now, Anna. Tell me what it is you want.”

Anna dug her hand in a pocket of her gold jumpsuit, pulled out a crumpled piece of paper, and pressed it on the desk. She pushed it across to Maura.

The paper looked like a page torn out of an exercise book. It contained a list written out in a childish hand, complete with errors, a couple of the longer words even phonetically spelled.

She passed it to Dan Ystebo. “Deuterium,” he read. “A linear electrostatic decelerator… Maura, I think they want to grow Tinkerbell. Maybe even make her some companions.”

Anna said, “We will give you the Tinkerbell. And others.” She frowned with the effort of speaking, as if English were becoming unfamiliar. “They could light cities, drive starships.” She looked at Maura. “Do you understand?”

“So far,” Maura said dryly.

“We have other gifts to offer,” said Anna. “In the future.”

“More technology?”

Anna was concentrating, a crease appearing in the middle of her perfect forehead. “We are still learning, here at this center. And elsewhere.”

Dan leaned forward. “Are you in touch with the others? The other children, like you? In the other centers? How?”

She returned his gaze calmly. “We have suggestions. Ways of making food. Ways to make medicine, to make ill people well, to make them—” that pause, the struggle with the language again “ — not grow old. And we have better ways for people to be together.”

Dan frowned. “What do you mean? Politics? Ethics?”

“I don’t know those words.”

Maura said, “Better ways for people like me to run things.”

“Yes. But nobody should have to run things.”

Dan laughed out loud. “She gotcha there, Representative.”

“We have to work all this out,” Anna said.

“I understand,” Maura said evenly. But the promise is there. “And you will give us all this.”

“In return.”

“In return for what?”

“No harm.”

Maura nodded. “You must understand I can’t promise you anything. Those in charge here have a wider duty, to protect people. Do you understand that people are frightened of you?”

Anna returned her gaze, and Maura felt chilled.

“This is an important time,” Anna said suddenly. “Everything we do now is very important. Because everything comes out of

here.”

“Out of the here and now,” Dan said. “The future flows from this moment. We cast long shadows. Is that what you mean?”

Anna didn’t reply. She seemed to be withdrawing.

Dan was frustrated. “Why are you here? To help us avoid the Carter catastrophe? Are you from the future, Anna?”

There was no reply, and Maura put her hand on Dan’s arm to silence him.

The sunlight outside the center buildings was hot, flat, glaring.

Tinkerbell in a cage.

Everything Maura had seen seemed unreal, remote, as if swimming away into space after Reid Malenfant.

“Quite a prospectus those kids offer,” Dan was saying.

“Yes.”

“New technologies, new medicine, new clean power. What sounded like a Utopian political and ethical framework. Peace and prosperity for all.”

“Absolutely,” Maura said.

“So, you think anyone will listen?”

“Not a hope in hell.”

Dan sighed. “But we’ll want the goodies even so, won’t we?”

“You bet. You think we can afford to give them what they want? The deuterium, the decelerator…”

“Representative, I’m not sure if we can afford not to.” Dan glanced around to be sure nobody else could overhear them. “So here we have these children building their magic cage just in time for this quark nugget — which has been wandering the universe since the Big Bang — to come floating in, ripe to be captured. And not only that, it arrives in the nick of time to save Anna from the evil clutches of wacko Wayne Dupree. And on exactly the right trajectory, too.”

“Coincidence?”

“What do you think?”

“Not in a million years,” she said.

Ystebo scratched his belly. “I’d offer you longer odds than that… I think we’re dealing with another of those damn causal loops. Somebody, far enough downstream, has the technology to reach into the past to deflect the path of a quark nugget just so, to make it arrive right on cue to save the day. It may have been traveling a billion years, just to get here and play its part. The ulti-

mate deus ex. machinal

“And that makes you feel…”

“Awed. Terrified.”

“Dan, are they threatening us?”

“Not directly. But, look: if we don’t cooperate, the children will know in the future, when they grow up, when they get downstream. I mean, they’ll remember what we did, and they’ll send more quark nuggets from the Big Bang and get what they want anyhow, maybe causing a lot more damage.” He seemed to be shivering, despite the heavy warmth of the sun. “If you think about it, it could happen any moment, depending on the decisions we make. It won’t even be necessary to wait for consequent actions to flow; the children will know. Representative, we can’t be sure what we’re dealing with here. A multiheaded monster spanning past, present, and future. The children have, effectively, unlimited power…”

The thought of the children, their grown versions, in the future — in the far downstream, with much enhanced powers — reaching back with some kind of time-manipulation technology to right the wrongs they suffered here was startling. Children have been victims throughout history, she thought bleakly; maybe all children should have such power, and we would treat them with respect.

But then she found herself thinking like a politician, as someone responsible for her nation’s destiny: Now, assuming this threat from the downstream children is real, how would you go about eliminating it?

Why, by making sure the children never reach the downstream. Of course.

Immediately she filed that ugly logic, its foul conclusion, in the back of her mind.

But she knew it would be with her, part of her calculation, from now on; and she hated herself for it.

“So,” Dan said. “What do we do now?”

“The same as always,” Maura said briskly. “We try not to do too much damage while we wait to see what happens next. Oh. Is there any way we can contact the mother? Tom Tybee’s mother?”

Dan laughed. “Don’t you know where she is right now?”

They walked on toward the security fence, where their car was waiting.

June Tybee

The throwing-up had started when Bucephalus was still on the

ground.

That was nerves rather than space sickness. But it began in earnest once the injection to Earth orbit was complete, and the crew were put through the complexity of docking with the preor-bited tanks of fuel required to reach Cruithne. Then when the diarrhea cut in, the recycled air filled with a stench so powerful June knew they would be living with it for the rest of the trip.

And you couldn’t open the windows, not once.

June suffered herself. Most of the troopers did. But she got over it four, five days out.

Not everybody adapted so well, however. Eight troopers — sixteen percent of the total — -just kept barfing and shitting and getting weaker and weaker, unable even to hold down a morsel of food. So they had been allocated a corner of one of the decks, screened off from the rest, and were basically treated as casualties, nonfunctional for the duration of the voyage, all the way out to Cruithne and back.

The rest of the troopers endured tough exercise regimes: three or more hours a day on treadmills, on elasticated ropes for stretching against, and so forth. Even so, the medics said, they would likely suffer some longer-term physiological damage: bone calcium depletion and other shit. But that could be treated later, when they got back to Earth. On their return in glory, after the medals and the handshakes from the prez, they would all be retired on fat pensions, with a full entitlement to sell their stories to the highest bidders. Plenty of time to put right a little calcium loss then.

What was more important now was getting through the mission in one piece, so June could get back to Bill and Tom and Billie and the rest of her life.

A week out, the troopers dismantled the interior of this big five-deck troop module, opening up a giant cylindrical space like a huge oil can, and they began their zero G exercises in earnest.