I tried to read truth or falsehood in his eyes and couldn’t manage either. I asked Jeannie, instead, then relayed her information. “That sort of thing started to happen. In the very-late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We developed treatments.”
“We didn’t! Don’t you understand? We bought you time.”
“Bought us . . . ?” The things I knew suddenly clicked into place. An influenza which killed those with the strongest immune systems. Killed them by the tens of millions. Leaving those with weaker immune systems still alive to pass that on to future generations. “Eugenics.”
“No! This isn’t about making humanity ‘better,’ whatever the hell that means. It’s about culling enough of the strongest immune systems from the human gene pool now in order to put off the onset of the auto-immune plagues for another one or two generations. Long enough for medical science to develop the means to diagnose and treat the disorders before they overwhelm the human race.”
I turned inward to Jeannie again. “Is what he’s saying plausible?”
“The scenario outlined does not fall outside the realm of possible historical outcomes.”
“Is it likely?”
“Insufficient data.”
Smith shuddered, and I looked down to see my hand gripping his arm so tightly that even on his thin frame the flesh was coming up in ridges between my fingers. “You want to be free to kill tens of millions of people.”
His gaze was defiant, now. “Yes. For the sake of billions of people in the future.”
“I’ve heard that argument before.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“Do you think this’ll save you? Produce an alternate version of you who’s healthy?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Not about me.” His eyes flicked away from mine, but I saw tears welling there. “The kids.” He was whispering again. “Dear God. The kids. They don’t even know. Don’t understand what’s twisting and crippling and killing them. They live and die in pain and we can’t even explain to them what’s happening. We can’t help them.”
It’s not supposed to be like this. When you meet someone bent on mass-murder they’re supposed to foam at the mouth and talk like a fanatic and their eyes are supposed to be filled with righteous certainty. And I was supposed to be absolutely certain that stopping those deaths was the right thing to do. Instead, I felt a sick uncertainty inside, and translated it into anger. “You’re just killing a few tens of millions of people for the kids, huh? You don’t plan on being better off yourself? Do you realize the odds that introducing this plague here and now could just cancel you out? Eliminate your ancestors so you never exist outside of the closed loop you’ve created? You’d never see that great new world you say you want to make.”
Smith’s mouth worked for a moment before he could answer, but I saw a strange glint of what I thought must be eagerness in his eyes. “This is more important than me.”
I closed my eyes to shut out the sight of his. There was only one thing I could be certain of. In my history, Smith’s mission had unquestionably succeeded in its immediate goal. The Spanish Influenza had killed its millions upon millions. If I stopped him, I’d be making a major temporal intervention with results I couldn’t predict on the future from that point forward. Would it be the hell Smith was describing? Or better? Or worse? There simply wasn’t any way for me to know. “How can I let you go out of here and kill tens of millions of people?” I finally said softly.
Smith kept his eyes fixed on mine. “For the sake of billions yet to come.”
“That kind of math is an abomination.”
“It’s also true. Dammit, do you think we wanted to do this?”
And somehow I knew then that Smith wasn’t lying. He might be delusional or crazy, but he believed what he was saying. Which left it up to me. Change my future, or let Smith kill on a scale unmatched in human history. Save tens of millions, maybe, and if Smith was to be believed condemn billions to awful fates. Take a chance that whatever my own intervention caused here would produce a future no worse than the one I knew of from this point forward. But that was impossible to know. Even aside from the group impact of so many humans living who’d died in my history, any one of those individual Spanish Influenza victims could’ve been another Hitler or another Einstein or another Martin Luther or another Julius Caesar. I looked at Smith again, letting my eyes stray down his ruined body. What kind of society would send somebody in his physical condition on a mission it regarded as so important? Only a society at the end of its rope.
I didn’t trust myself to speak. I just let my grip on Smith go and stepped back. Then I turned around and walked out. He might’ve called something after me. I couldn’t be sure and didn’t want to know.
Dawn found me staring across the anchorage of Freeport, thinking about the extra, unknown cargo those ships would be carrying soon. I looked down at my hands, didn’t see any blood there, and wondered why. Twenty million. At least. For the future good of the human race. For the future I knew, for better or worse, though it easily could’ve turned out a lot worse. I knew that, and when push came to shove I couldn’t risk a worse outcome in the future. Even though that future now felt forever tainted. Playing god isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “Jeannie -.”
“Yes?”
“It’s nothing. I just finally figured something out.” That flash of eagerness in Smith’s eyes. He wasn’t afraid of being cancelled out of the future he was creating. No, he wanted to be cancelled out of that future. Wanted to cease to exist, so that even an alternate version of him who had no idea what ‘he’d’ done would suffer the ultimate penalty. I understood now. Because, unlike Smith, I’d have to live with the knowledge of what I’d done, or more correctly what I hadn’t done, for the rest of my life. “Work up a jump home, Jeannie. Let’s get out of here.” Before Smith’s influenza started its deadly march across the planet.
I hope the kids who would’ve been Smith’s came out okay.
Author's Note on Where Does a Circle Begin?
Whenever you think about time travel the issue of causality comes up. Causality just means that whatever caused something has to happen before the thing it causes. But if you can travel through time, the cause could happen after whatever it caused. Or so most thinking goes. But the physics equations that govern the situation work either way. If it turns out that time travel is possible, then it will mean people from the future will be able to cause events in the past. And if they can someday do that, it means our own past already reflects their meddling with history. You know, all of those astounding coincidences and baffling events that are explained away or just ignored in the history books. Like a certain event which has been called the most amazing technological coincidence in the history of warfare . . .
Where Does a Circle Begin?
A fine mist fell from a gun-metal sky, adding a soggy undertone to the chill that ate into me from the surrounding air. Mud sucked at my boots as I eased along the fence, listening for any sounds of human activity, especially the sloshing tramp of a sentry making rounds. I'd researched what a minié ball could do to human flesh and didn't want to gain any personal experience with humanity's current state-of-the-art in maiming-and-killing technology.
Still, you gotta do what you gotta do. Portsmouth, Virginia, on January 12th, 1862 certainly offered rotten weather and the threat of deadly violence, but it also likely held information of great importance to me and my client. I'd jumped into Richmond, the capital of the American Southern Confederacy, looking for clues to a possible Intervention and the biggest clue I'd found here-and-now pointed to this spot. A former U.S. warship, a frigate to be precise, had been burned to the waterline at Portsmouth in 1861 when U.S. government troops pulled out one step ahead of the Confederates. The useless wreck had later been towed out and sunk in Hampton Roads after the Union retook the city. Which made the here-and-now work around the frigate's hulk very interesting indeed. Why had Richmond ordered a Confederate shipyard t
o waste time on a burned-out ship? One more sailing ship, more or less, couldn't make any real difference in the war. It was an anomaly, something that didn't fit with the history I knew, and that made it number one on the list of things to check out.
Of course, I could just jump several years ahead and see What had happened When to help the Confederates, but then I'd be fighting history instead of working with it. Momentum helps a lot. Besides, Interventions snowballed. A small Intervention early on could produce major changes down the line, so that I'd waste effort fighting the big changes and still not identify or counter the original Intervention. The people I’d been hired to stop knew that as well as I did. So, here I was in 1862 getting rained on.
Despite its aged appearance, the fence around the shipyard felt pretty sturdy wherever I tried it. Bowing to the inevitable, I reached up and swung myself over, blessing the fact that barbed wire hadn't yet been invented. On the other side, the mud was even worse, a fact I confirmed by sinking into it up to my ankles when I landed. An assortment of two-story brick buildings loomed in the mist, surrounded by the usual piles of shipyard junk. Ahead, the Elizabeth River rolled sluggishly toward its junction with the branch of the Chesapeake Bay known as Hampton Roads. On the other side of the Elizabeth, the buildings of Norfolk were invisible in the gray drizzle.
The dry-docks were big ship-shaped holes lined with brick, set below the level of the river, protected from the water by huge gates. Given the nearly-non-existent status of the Confederate States Navy, it was hardly surprising that most were empty. One, though, had a separate fence around it, a fence obviously of newer vintage than that surrounding the shipyard as a whole. It also had lamps hung at more-or-less regular intervals and entirely too many sentries in gray cloaks pacing around, each huddled against the weather but obviously still alert for intruders.
"Jeannie, do you have a map of this place in 1862 on file?"
Nano-implants are beautiful things. Help's never far away. My Personal Assistant considered the question for a long moment before replying on her internal link: Sorry. That's not available.
"Blast." In a history replete with lost and destroyed records, even close-at-hand help could be of limited use. Okay, so I'd have do it the hard way. Picking the nearest brick building, I eased close, eyeballing the doors and windows for possible access and the presence of any more guards. Entry proved easy by prying open a wooden-framed window. I prowled down the halls, checking offices for signs of construction information and keeping my eyes and ears peeled for roving sentries.
The fourth office I tried held the jackpot. They weren't plans as such, but they were a whole list of requisitioned materials. From that list, it was pretty obvious what the Confederates were doing to that burned-out ship. It was also obvious that I had my work cut out for me. My opponents were well along to achieving a very effective Intervention that might well swing events decisively in the South's favor.
Fortunately for the North and my client, Confederate guards wore heavy shoes. I heard the tramp of footsteps coming down the hall outside. I'd been carrying my muddy boots since entering the building, but they'd dripped some on the way down the hall, leaving a scattered but incriminating trail. If the sentry happened to be careless or tired that wouldn't matter, but this one was neither. The steps halted near my door, then came again, much softer and slower.
The door swung slightly open, prodded by a sharp steel point at the end of a long three-sided bayonet stuck on the business end of a .69 caliber Enfield rifle. Very crude weapons by my standards, but at close range sophisticated technology isn’t a requirement for deadliness. Eventually, a middle-aged guy in a gray uniform stuck his nose in the room, swinging his rifle barrel from side-to-side as he surveyed the office. Shrugging, he brought the barrel up to a ready position and walked out, closing the door carefully behind him.
I relaxed, lowering my arms where they’d been poised to slam the door into the sentry if he’d tried to enter the room any further. It’s funny how often the old standing-behind-the-door trick works, but then maybe it wasn’t old in the here-and-now. I took another long look at the papers in the office, sizing up the opposition, while the footfalls headed away. Once they'd faded out, I eased back through the door, aiming for the window I'd jimmied on the way in.
"Haaalt!" The accent was very broad but the meaning unmistakable. I fixed an expression meant to convey confusion and fear on my face, then turned slowly, hands and arms dangling loosely. The guy with the rifle stood there, looking determined. He'd been smarter than I’d expected, faking a walk-away and then watching for anybody to show up. "Who're you?"
"Me? One of the builders. I'm working on the ship."
His face worked as the words soaked in, then lit with a sudden realization. "Hey! You're a Yankee!"
"No. Not at all. I was born on Io."
"Huh?" While he was still digesting that, I threw my left hand wide, drawing both his attention and rifle barrel that way, then pointed my right hand and fired the stun charge implanted along the bottom of the first digit. The crystal hit him low on the torso, drawing a surprised jerk as the sentry focused back on me, then the chemical hit and his eyes rolled up, his knees collapsed, and the rest of his body went limp as a Beta Cetian without an exoskeleton. I caught both falling man and falling weapon, not just because I needed the Karma but because I didn't need any loud crashes drawing anybody else's attention.
The stun charge would keep him out for about a half hour, after which he’d look and feel like he was suffering from a severe hangover. Since the stun crystal didn’t leave a noticeable entry wound, he’d hopefully have a hard time making anyone believe he’d been knocked out by an intruder instead of a bottle. I propped the guy up, weapon at his feet, and left him snoring away. "Sleep tight."
#
Richmond in 1861 had that ugly ambiance which seems to afflict every capital of every warring political entity. The streets were packed with smiling generals in crisp, pretty uniforms who'd probably never gone anywhere near a battle, a few other generals with grim expressions and outfits battered by hard use who looked eager to get out of town again, hordes of hearty men in suits who flashed money and talked about war contracts, and lots and lots of kids in new, ill-fitting battle garb who gawked at the big city while passing through on their way to the ironic immortality that death in battle brings. Money, glory and death walking hand-in-hand. I've never cared for it, but you couldn’t do jumps without running into that kind of scenario, and if I wanted to keep tabs on what the Confederates were doing, I had to be where they made their big decisions, which meant Richmond.
I'd made a short jump downtime so there'd be enough time to get my counter-Intervention going, but I wasn't sure yet what form it should take. Try to short-circuit the other Intervention before it happened, or whip up a counter-Intervention to stop it later? I could only afford a few more jumps on what my client had paid me, so I had to do things right the first time. For now I sat in a fancy restaurant with war-profiteer inflated prices, eating Smithfield ham while surrounded by Southern aristocrats all confidently predicting a short and victorious war. Funny how nobody ever predicts long and losing wars.
"Greetings, Citizen Holmes."
The anachronistic title brought me slowly around, staring poker-faced at a tall, slim and familiar figure in a here-and-now expensive suit. I pretended to smile. "Harry Dawson. Small world.” Harry came from a period about a century Uptime from my own, but we’d met when we were students and he came Downtime to study under one of my professors who’d become famous in the intervening decades. Unfortunately, Harry’s idea of studying was to suck up to a professor tighter than a lamprey to a shark, a method which worked just often enough to earn him a degree and my lasting dislike. “What brings you here-and-now?”
He smiled back just as falsely. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
I shrugged. “Research. I wanted to check out the old Civil War battlefields.”
"There aren't any old Civil War batt
lefields yet. Some are new and the others haven’t been fought."
I scratched my head in mock puzzlement. “I wondered why so many locals were still running around in uniforms. I’ve got to talk to my Assistant about her scheduling of my jumps. So, why are you here?"
Harry flashed another smile notable for its lack of sincerity. “Good old, Mike. Always kidding.” He leaned forward, smirking. “I’m a T.I. Working for a big outfit. I guess they could recognize real talent.”
“Congratulations.” It wasn’t too hard to guess what kind of outfit would hire someone like Harry. Exactly the same sort of outfit working to ensure a Southern victory in the here-and-now.
Harry seated himself opposite me, playing idly with the heavy silver place setting before him. "Thanks. I hear you’re a Temporal Interventionist, too, Mike.”
"It’s one of the few jobs history majors are suited for,” I noted. “I’ve done a few Interventions."
“Yeah. I heard about that bit with the Wright Brothers. How’d you swing that?”
I couldn’t help smiling a trifle smugly. “Somebody wanted them to be the first to achieve powered heavier-than-air flight, but their craft was a touch too heavy. I slipped them some precipitation-hardened metal for their engine, just lighter enough than their state-of-the-art to do the trick. Somebody finally noticed the anachronism maybe a century later, but they just credited it to dumb luck.”
Harry smiled back, also smug. "Maybe it was dumb luck, Mike. You don’t seem to be too good at Interventions." He shook his head, trying to look sad this time. "You left a calling card up in 1862, Citizen. Sloppy." There wasn't anything too surprising about my use of the stun shot being detected. That the word had made it further Downtime, though, indicated Harry and his outfit were running multiple jumps to the same Downtimes. Apparently, his client had money to burn. "You think we can't spot stun after-effects?"