Chapter 6 
Chapter 6
A rattle of glassware punctuated the low buzz of voices like frog-song through the hum of mosquitoes. Familiar and comforting, the sounds rose in a welcoming chorus from the Down Time’s open doorway. Kit ushered Margo in first, aware that speculative glances were levied in their direction. Several glances lingered, some on Margo, some on the scouting equipment he conspicuously carried in the trademark leather satchel he’d been the first to construct. Dirt-stained and battered, it nevertheless remained sturdy and functional. At one time, Kit wouldn’t have felt fully dressed without it.
Behind the bar, a young woman with a long-boned face the British royals would’ve been proud to claim wiped up a spill and nodded. “Evenin’, luv.”
“Hello, Molly. Any seats left?”
In answer, she jerked her head toward a small table at the side of the room, missing all but two of its chairs. The Down Time was jam-packed, of course. Too much to ask for a quiet night, tonight of all nights. Kit recognized nearly everyone. Laughter punctuated a dozen conversations. “Thanks, Molly. How about a couple of ice waters?”
Molly’s long, clear-eyed gaze followed Margo as she made her way toward the indicated table, but the barmaid withheld comment, as she generally did. She filled a couple of glasses with ice cubes and water and handed them over. “Anythin’ else?”
Kit shook his head. “No, not just now. Maybe later.”
“Luv . . .”
Kit paused mid-step, causing the ice cubes to clink faintly. The chill of condensate sank into his hands, echoing the coldness which still gripped the rest of him. “Yeah?”
Molly’s brow had furrowed the tiniest bit, betraying intense worry. “Keep ’em open, Kit. She’s a sharper, she is.”
Kit glanced over to the table. Margo had taken up residence in the outer chair, which would leave Kit with his back against the wall. Margo’s cheeks were visibly flushed despite the low-light conditions which prevailed this time of night in the Down Time. She was all but quivering with excitement.
“I suspect she’s had reason,” Kit said quietly. “I’m just trying to keep her alive.”
Molly nodded. “’At’s awright, but keep ’em open, luv. Tike care she don’t steal yer bees an’ ’oney while yer’s back’s turned.”
Her concern that he might lose money to Margo surprised Kit—and touched him. “I’ll do that.”
She nodded briskly and turned to cater to another customer’s needs. Kit eased his way between tables, greeting friends as he went and parrying curious questions with a smile and off-hand jokes. Margo watched the ritual with wide eyes. He finally set the water glasses down and took the other chair. Margo sipped—then shot him a startled glance.
“Water? I’m not a baby!”
“You’re drinking what I am. Pay attention.”
Kit didn’t think he’d ever seen a more skillful disgruntled female flounce—stationary, no less, in a straight-backed bar chair—but she didn’t argue. “I’m listening.”
Given the rapt attention on her face, she was, too. “All right, Margo. Phase One: Equipment lecture.”
Kit rummaged in the satchel for his personal log and ATLS. Margo would need her own set. Kit made a quick note on his mental to-do list, then set both items out for inspection. “These two pieces of hardware are your lifeline.”
Margo peered at them without offering to touch. “What are they? I read that scouts used microcomputers and some gizmo to determine absolute time and Skee—I mean,” she flushed, “I was saving money from my job to buy whatever I’d need. Is that what these are?”
“Yes.” Kit picked up the personal log. A compact unit, smaller than an average letter-sized sheet of paper, it weighed more than it looked. “This is a time scout’s personal log.” He opened the case, pressed a latch, and lifted the tiny screen, revealing a keypad and the mesh grid of a microphone. “The casing is waterproof, shockproof, just about everything we can protect it from, except maybe immersion in strong acid or molten metal—or molten rock. It can be used in either voice or key mode. Scanners and digitizing micro-cameras can be attached. The personal log operates on a solar-powered system backed up with batteries that last about twenty-four hours between charges. It writes automatically to a micro-layer space-grown crystal matrix for storage, so there’s no chance of losing data even if you do experience catastrophic power failure. They’re expensive, but you don’t set foot through a gate without one.”
“So, they’re like a trip diary, for recording notes and stuff?”
Kit shook his head. “Much more important and much more detailed. This,” he tapped his log, “is quite literally what keeps me from killing myself.”
A tiny vertical line appeared between Margo’s brows. The uncertainty in her eyes mirrored a chain of thought that was almost comical.
“No,” Kit smiled, “I’m not suicidal. Although a large percentage of the population would argue any time scout is. How much reading have you done? Do you know what Shadowing is?”
Margo hesitated, clearly caught between answers. “Don’t be embarrassed to say no.”
“Well, no. I mean, I know there’s something weird about the gates and time scouts have to retire early because you can’t ever be in the same time twice, but I never read the word ‘shadowing’ or heard it used.”
As though to underscore her admission, a shadow falling across the table interrupted them. Kit glanced up—and held back a groan. Malcolm Moore had pulled up a chair. “Mind if I join you? This looks interesting.” He glanced from the scouting equipment to Kit to Margo and back to Kit, then grinned expectantly.
Kit considered telling him to buzz off, then thought better. Malcolm’s assistance might actually be useful. He’d scouted a couple of times and had given it up for guiding,
“Sure. Park it.”
Malcolm turned the chair around and sat down. “Hello, Margo. You look, um . . .”
“Ridiculous,” Kit said drily.
Margo flushed. “I didn’t have time to change.” She snatched the hat into her lap and ruffled her short hair. Kit winced at the movement of cleavage—and at Malcolm’s interested attention.
“Malcolm,” he said under his breath, “as you are a friend, don’t do that again.”
Malcolm’s brows soared. “Good Lord, Kit, what’s eating you? Can’t a man even pay a lady the compliment of noticing?”
“No.”
Margo just put her hands over her face.
“She’s, uh . . .” Oh, hell . . . “She’s my grandkid.”
Malcolm rocked back on his chair and stared. “Margo’s your granddaughter?”
Conversation cut short throughout the bar. Kit felt the flush start in his neck and work its way up into his hairline. Margo risked a peek, then groaned and hid her face again.
“Well, I’ll be . . . suckered.” Malcolm Moore was grinning like the proverbial village idiot. “Miss Margo, you can’t imagine what a wonderful surprise this is.”
The buzz of conversation picked up again, livelier than ever.
“I, uh,” Margo floundered for words. She shot a stricken glance at Kit, then settled for a faint, “Thanks.”
Kit glowered at Malcolm. “What I’m trying to do, here, is keep her alive. She wants to scout.”
Malcolm’s grin widened, which Kit would’ve bet was physically impossible. “Really? What was it you said the other day—”
“Never mind what I said the other day. I’m training her. Maybe. If—” he turned a severe glare on Margo “—she listens and learns.”
“I’m listening! So show me, already!”
“Good.” Kit drew a breath and downed half his water in one gulp, wishing it were something stronger. “Malcolm, here, has scouted a couple of times.”
Malcolm nodded. “Exactly twice. Then I switched to guiding.”
Margo rested her chin on her hands. “Why?”
Malcolm chuckled. “Because I wanted to live to see thirty.”
“Why does everyone keep saying scouting’s so dangerous?”
Malcolm glanced over. Kit just shrugged, leaving Malcolm on his own—and Kit was sure any answer the guide provided would be more than effective.
“Well,” Malcolm said quietly, “because it is. My first time out, I beat the witch-finders to the gate by about four minutes. One of them actually got through on sheer momentum and had to be tossed back through just as the gate was closing. If the gate hadn’t opened up, I’d have . . . Well, never mind. The second time, I missed Shadowing myself by about half an hour. Promised myself I’d never set foot through an unknown gate again.”
Then he chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, I did risk it just once more, when we rescued the folks who fell through that unstable gate in the floor, but I didn’t stop to think, then, I just jumped. I was lucky. Someone, thank God, had their log and ATLS with them, so at least I have a record of which gates we stumbled through trying to get home again.”
“Okay, so it’s dangerous. What’s this Shadowing stuff all about, exactly?”
Kit tapped the personal log absently with one fingernail. “It means you can’t cross your own shadow. Not and survive. If you step through a gate into, say, Rome on a.d. 100, March twenty-fourth, 2:00 p.m. sun time, you log into this machine exactly when and where you are. How you determine when and where you are, I’ll explain in a minute. The point is, you note down exactly when you arrived, where you arrived, how long you stayed, and when you left. You keep track of when and where you’ve been. Okay, let’s say somebody else pushes a gate into Meso-America, a.d. 100, March twenty-third. If you step through that gate, and stay past March twenty-fourth 2:00 p.m. Italian time, one of you disappears. The current you. The Roman you is alive in the past, but the real-time you just died. You cannot cross your own shadow. Paradox doesn’t happen, because you vanish completely, forever.”
Margo shrugged. “Sounds easy enough to avoid. You just don’t try to watch Julius Caesar murdered twice.”
Malcolm said, “You couldn’t do that, anyway. The two ends of the time strings that form gates are connected. They move at the same pace. If a week goes by here, a week goes by there. Once you miss an opportunity to see something, it’s gone forever, unless another time string opens up to the same point in time.
Of course, if you tried to go back, you’d cross your shadow and end up not seeing it—or anything else—ever again.”
‘The point is,” Kit nodded, “the more down-time trips you make, the greater the odds that when you step through a gate into some unknown time, you’ll already exist somewhere and somewhen else. Eventually the odds catch up and you die.”
Margo chewed her lower lip in a thoughtful fashion. “So . . . you take this gamble every time you walk through an open gate, because you never know when—to what time—it leads? Why bother to keep records at all, if you could just vanish anyway? Seems like a lot of fuss, when you could blip out before you knew what hit you, no matter what you put in this thing. I mean, you don’t know when you’re going, so what does it matter that you know when you’ve been?”
Kit told himself that Margo was very young. “A couple of reasons. First, it’s your job, as scout, to keep meticulous records. Scholars and tour companies will want to review any data you bring back. Second, if you don’t keep records, you could accidentally kill yourself just trying to take a vacation or by trying to visit another station, or even the wrong gate in the same station.”
“Huh?” She leveled an incredulous stare in Kit’s direction. Clearly, she hadn’t done enough research. Margo damned small-town libraries, high schools controlled by school boards opposed to things like “Evil-lution” and a father who’d drunk every penny she might have saved toward a computer to hook into the big information nets.
Malcolm nodded. “He’s right. Even guides have to be careful about that. Every station is built at least as far back as 1910, to get around the problem of people stepping into a time after they were born. That’s why up-time lobbies have warning signs. Surely you saw the one on the other side of our Primary? IF YOU WERE BORN ON OR BEFORE APRIL 28, 1910, DO NOT STEP THROUGH THIS GATE. YOU WILL DIE IF YOU ATTEMPT TO ENTER THE TIME TERMINAL! The date on that sign changes every day, to match Shangri-la’s relative temporal location. They had to beef up security about ten years ago when a few desperate senior citizens committed suicide by stepping through, rather than face starvation or terminal cancer.”
“Well, I understand that danger,” Margo sniffed, “and I remember seeing TV shows about those poor old people who killed themselves. But what’s this stuff about dying if you visit some other terminal or the wrong gate on the same terminal?”
“We’re not just trying to scare you off,” Kit said quietly. “The temporal position of any station, in its relation to absolute time, is different from any other station’s temporal position. Terminals 17 and 56 are absolutely deadly to anyone on Shangri-la. If I tried to visit TT-56, I’d accidentally emerge into last week, when I was very much present at Shangri-la Station, which is currently . . .”
He checked the chronometer built into his personal log. “Which is currently April 28,1910, 22:01:17, local—i.e. Tibetan—time zone. Time guides have to be careful, too.”
Malcolm nodded. “It’s why we guides tend to specialize in tours through just a handful of gates leading out of one terminal. I could go to one of the other terminals and look for a scouting job, but I’d have to do careful homework first to be sure which terminals and which tours were safe for me. The Denver and London gates here in La-La Land can be just as deadly. The Denver gate is currently opening into 1885, the London gate into 1888. If I try to take a tourist to Denver during the same week I’d already taken someone else to London three years previously . . .” He shrugged. “I’d accidentally kill myself. So we keep damned good records of where and when we’ve been. That little credit card you were issued when you bought your Primary Gate ticket? The one they encoded for you before you came down time? When tourists use the gates, their Timecards are encoded in both directions—going down time and coming back—so they have a record of when they’ve been. If the computer catches an overlap, it sounds an alarm.”
Margo’s eyes were beginning to take on a glazed look.
“Careful as the precautions are,” Kit added grimly, “there are still accidents, even with the tourists. Time scouts have to be paranoid about it. For instance, I could only visit TT-17 if I went up time and stayed for at least a year. TT-17’s always twelve months and six hours behind this one, same geographical zone, about a thousand miles north of here. If I went through TT-17’s Primary without letting it ‘catch up’ and pass by my last exit from TT-86, I’d never live to see the other side.”
Malcolm said, “There have even been organized-crime murders committed that way, particularly yakuza killings. They select a victim, get them to take out a huge insurance policy naming a gang member as beneficiary, treat them to an Edo Castletown tour out of Shangri-la on a false ID, then some other gang member takes them to Terminal 56 on their own ID, so they shadow themselves in front of witnesses. Instant profit.”
Margo shivered. “Okay. I think I get it.”
“Now that you’ve been here, you’ll have the same problem. The longer you stay, the greater the chance of overlap. The more gates you step through, the more complicated the whole mess becomes. That’s why the log is essential.”
Margo rested her elbows on the table. “Okay, point taken. We have to be careful. But I still say you can get run over by a bus, not paying attention. What’s the other thing for?”
Kit sat back in his chair. Was she being flippant to hide fear? Or was she just that silly? Or that stubborn? He wondered how often she’d gotten what she wanted just by smiling that enchanting smile or by coming back with a wisecrack that set people to chuckling. Just what sort of life had Margo known before hunting him up? Given her prickly defenses and that over-sharp tongue, Kit wasn’t too sure he wanted an answer.
“It’s an ATLS. Absolute Time Locator System. That ‘gizmo’ you mentioned reading about. It works on a combination of geo-magnetic sensors and star-charting systems. The ATLS places you more or less exactly in time and geographic location, relative to absolute Greenwich time.”
“More or less?” Margo echoed. “Isn’t it precise?”
“Scouts always fudge by at least twenty-four hours in both directions when using the ATLS, just to be sure. Most of us build an even larger safety margin in, because as good as the ATLS is, it isn’t absolutely precise. It can’t be. Our lives are riding on how closely we cut it. Without it—and the personal log—we couldn’t function at all. Even time touring would be impossible, because the tour companies need scouts to push new tour routes. The ATLS’s casing gives it the same land of protection your personal log has.”
Margo was frowning at the ATLS. “If it’s so dangerous to step through, why not just put the ATLS on a long pole and shove that through, then let it do its thing? That way nobody’d ever have to risk going ‘poof.’”
Kit shook his head. “It isn’t that simple. For one, you have only a fifty-fifty chance of a gate opening at night. If it opens during the day, you can’t take a star-fix, so the long pole idea would be useless. Or it might be a cloudy night—no stars. We could roboticize the whole thing, I suppose, and send it through to take the proper magnetic and star-fix readings, but it would cost a ton of money for each robot and there are thousands of unexplored gates with new ones opening all the time. Anything could still go wrong and recovering the robot might prove impossible. Frankly, human scouts are cheaper, more reliable, and have the advantage of being able to gather detailed social data no robot could. That’s important particularly when scholarly research or potential time touring is involved.
“We,” he tapped his breast bone, “are expendable. We’re independent businessmen, on nobody’s payroll. No insurance company in the world will touch us, not even Lloyd’s of London. That’s another downside to scouting. No health coverage, no life insurance, no disability policies. You sign on for this job, you take your chances. There is a guild, if you care to pay the dues, but the treasury’s almost always empty. Time scouts tend to suffer catastrophic illnesses and injuries with depressing frequency. I hope,” he added grimly, “that you have a high pain threshold and don’t faint at the sight of blood—yours or anyone else’s.”
Margo didn’t answer. But her chin came up a stubborn notch, despite sudden pallor beneath already fair skin.
Kit sat back. “Huh. I’ll give you credit for guts, girl. All right, let me show you how these operate.”
He and Malcolm took her step by step through the operation of both machines, although they couldn’t shoot a star-fix from inside La-La Land. The personal log she caught onto fairly quickly. The ATLS’s geo-magnetic sensors gave her trouble.
“No, you’re plotting that reading backwards, Margo. You’ve just put yourself half a continent off target, which means you’ve just calculated the time zone completely wrong, as well. Run it again.”
“I hate math!” Margo snapped. “How was I supposed to know I’d need all this crap?”
Malcolm visibly suppressed a wince. Very gently, Kit took the ATLS from her. “All right. We’ll begin by having you hone up on basic skills. I’ll schedule study times for you in the library. And not just for remedial math. You’ll need language skills, historical studies, costuming and customs, sociological structures . . .
Margo was looking at him in wide-eyed horror.
“Let me guess,” Kit said drolly. “You thought time scouting was a way to avoid college?”
She didn’t answer, but he could read it in her eyes.
“Kid, if you want to be a time scout, the first thing you have to become is a scholar. Scouts are a rough and ready bunch—we have to be—but most of us started life as historians or classics professors or philosophers or anthropologists. We’re the best-educated bunch of roughnecks this side of eternity.”
Malcolm laughed “I have a Ph.D. in Roman antiquities.”
Margo sat back and crossed her arms. “This is maddening. If I’d wanted a Ph.D., I’ve have gone to school. All I want to do is explore neat places!”
Kit started to say something that would have been entirely too heartfelt, but Malcolm beat him to the punch.
“Fame and fortune and adventure?” he asked in a voice dry as fine wine.
She flushed.
Kit felt like cheering. “That’s fine,” he told her. “But you have to pay the dues. And we have an agreement, Margo. You do what I tell you, when I tell you, or you don’t set that first pretty pink toe across the threshold of agate.”
She pouted at the ATLS. Then sighed. “All right. I’ll go to the library. Isn’t there anything to this job besides studying?”
“Sure.” Kit sat back. “Plenty, in fact. How much martial arts training have you had?”
She shrugged. “High school stuff. I have a belt.”
“What kind, which discipline?”
“Brown belt, Tai Kwan Do.”
Kit grunted. All flying lacks and damn near no full-contact sparring, not compared to what she’d need. Tai Kwan Do spent too much time “pulling” its punches short to give a student a taste of what it was like to hit—or be hit. He saw the chance for an object lesson that might just sink home.
“All right. Let’s go.”
“Go? Go where?”
Kit returned the log and ATLS to their leather satchel.
“To the gym. I want to test how much you know.”
“You . . . now?”
Kit grinned. “Yep. What’s the matter, Margo? Afraid an old man will whip you?”
Slim jaw muscles took on a marble hardness. She came to her feet and planted hands on hips. “No. I’m not afraid of anybody or anything. Where’s the damned gym?”
“Watch your language,” he said mildly “The gym is in the basement, next to the weapons ranges.”
Her eyes widened “Weapons ranges?” Her expression hovered somewhere between excitement and dismay. “You mean, like guns and stuff?”
Kit exchanged glances with Malcolm, who rolled his eyes. Kit forcibly held back a sigh. “Yes, Margo. I mean exactly like guns and stuff. If it can be shot, slashed with, or jabbed into someone, you’re going to learn how to use it.”
“Oh.”
Clearly, this was another aspect of time scouting his granddaughter had not considered. She looked like she’d rather have picked up a live cobra than picked up a weapon. Good. Maybe this would convince her to quit. Given the set of her jaw, Kit rather doubted that, but it made for a pleasant fantasy. He had a sinking feeling nothing he did or said would dissuade her.
Margo said primly, “If we’re going to spar, I’ll need to visit the lady’s room first.”
Malcolm shot to his feet and hovered at the back of her chair, but didn’t quite offer to take her hand to assist her. Kit glowered. Margo gave Malcolm a sweet smile that left Kit’s glower even darker. Malcolm had the good grace to look sheepish as Margo made her way through the crowded bar. Very nearly every eye in the place followed her progress. Kit shook his head. The dress had to go. Preferably into the trash. Or maybe over Skeeter Jackson’s head.
“How about you, Malcolm? You coming to the gym, too?”
The freelance guide chuckled. “Just try and get rid of me. I wouldn’t miss this for a full-time job.”
“You,” Kit muttered, “are a pain in the neck.”
“Hey, don’t blame me,” Malcolm laughed. “You’re the one who agreed to teach her.”
“Yeah, I did. I figure it’s either teach her or bury her.”
Malcolm’s laughter vanished. “Yeah. I know. You need help, you let me know.”
Kit gave him a pained smile. “I’ll do that. I figure I owe you.”
Malcolm groaned. “How come I have a bad feeling about this?”
“Because,” Kit punched his shoulder, “your luck stinks.”
The younger man chuckled. ‘Well, I won’t argue that. All right, here she comes. Smile, Grandpa.”
Kit muttered, “You’d better salute when you say that, mister.” Malcolm just laughed. Kit said forlornly, “I will never live this down. Never.” He pasted on what he hoped passed for a smile. “Okay, Margo, let’s go.”
Phase One underway.
And a lifetime’s worth of worrying yet to come.