4
“I was born in the year 2282,” Katherine began. My face must have shown doubt because she quickly added, “I’m not going to waste time trying to convince you of what you already know, Kate.”
“Before my birth,” she continued, “it was decided that I would be a historian. My parents had saved a bit and, as I understand it, my grandparents and a childless aunt also contributed some funds, so there were several chosen gifts from which my parents could select. Everyone is allowed one—and only one—chosen gift. Initially they were distributed by lottery, but money has a way of opening doors in any society. All things weighed together, I’m not unhappy with their purchase.”
Connor returned from the kitchen with three mugs of black coffee that looked much too strong for human consumption and a large box of cookies, which he clearly would have eaten all by himself had Katherine not nodded in my direction. He gave up three gingersnaps—grudgingly, I thought—and propped his feet on the short table positioned between his chair and the couch.
Katherine continued. “Had my family been less well off or less inclined to invest in my future, I might have been given special aptitude for healing or for music, or some other trade or craft. My father’s chosen gift was chemistry. My mother’s chosen gift was logic, and she worked for many years at CHRONOS—programming the computers that were used to track historical missions and analyze the data they collected.”
I took a sip of my coffee, wishing for some milk to cut the burned taste. “What exactly is CHRONOS? I saw that in several diary entries.”
“Chrono-Historical Research Organization and Natural Observation Society,” Connor said through a mouthful of cookie. “Proving that future Americans are just as willing as their ancestors to contrive a title in order to get a good backronym.”
“At any rate,” Katherine said, raising an eyebrow at him, “my mother loved her work at CHRONOS—no surprise, since she and everyone else of my time are, quite literally, born to love their jobs. But I think there was some small element of wanderlust in her soul. The chosen gift she selected for me meant that I would see different times and places—”
“But,” I interrupted, my voice a bit hesitant, “what about free choice? I mean, what if you’d rather have been a chemist, like your dad? Or a baker? Or…”
Katherine smiled, but it was a tired smile. I could see that it wasn’t the first time she’d dealt with these questions. “Yes. But there is much to be said for making some adjustments before birth. How much time is wasted today training children to perform a variety of skills that they not only will never use but would never even consider using? I remember your mother complaining that she would never need to know the square root of anything, and while I forced her to do the math homework nevertheless, we both knew she was correct.
“Don’t get me wrong—people still learned about subjects beyond their occupation. We still had hobbies and avocations. But we all knew the general route to our primary destination when the journey began, and we didn’t regret the destination, nor did we have any desire to change it. After all, our genetic makeup ensured that we would be far better at our jobs than anything else we attempted—and far better at our jobs than others, who did not have that chosen gift, could ever be.”
“So everything you are was determined before you were born, by this… enhancement?”
“No. The only thing that was changed before my birth was my chosen gift. I have some natural gifts from my parents—my mother could sing beautifully and I can carry a tune quite well. Like you, I have my father’s eyes, although you’re lucky—Harry’s eyes are far more striking.”
Connor leaned forward and squinted a bit, staring me straight in the eyes. “Very… green.” Unsure whether it was intended as a compliment, or whether Connor even bothered with such niceties, I simply nodded.
“I also have some residual effects from the chosen gifts my parents received. Like my mother, I’m good with computers.” Connor snorted derisively and Katherine amended the statement. “Or rather, I’m good with computers that are not centuries before my time. I am more than happy, however, to let Connor handle the archaic piles of nuts and bolts that he refers to as a computer.”
Katherine stopped to take a sip of her coffee and turned back to me. “I do understand your… concern… about free choice, but let’s set that aside for the time being, okay? I didn’t devise the society in which I was born any more than you devised this one, and I’m perfectly willing to admit that it has its flaws. The point I wanted to make is that the gifts of the parent—all gifts, chosen and natural—are passed along to the child. I inherited some from my mother, some from my father, and I acquired one specific, chosen gift that I passed on to your mother and that she clearly passed on to you, given your reaction to the medallion.”
I was getting increasingly confused. “But Mom can’t see the light on the medallion.”
“That doesn’t mean the trait isn’t there. It’s just recessive. It might not even be the reason she’s interested in contemporary American history. She was exposed to it enough through Jim. He was one of those professors who always had historical anecdotes on the tip of his tongue. In your case, however, the trait is dominant.”
“Why do you think that?” I asked. “Just because I can see that blue light? I mean, I like history, but I like a lot of subjects. I haven’t decided what I want to do. I could just as easily settle on math, you know—or a foreign language. Or law.”
“It’s not just a matter of interest, Kate. For many of the specialized trades and professions, a chosen gift—the genetic ‘enhancement,’ as you call it—carries with it the ability to operate specialized equipment used in that profession. I saw you in the kitchen yesterday. You were born a CHRONOS historian, whether you want to be or not, just as I was.
“I won’t bore you with all the mundane details of my job,” she continued, “but unlike your mother, who must study her field through documents and artifacts, I traveled to the sites where history was made. I specialized in women’s political movements, mostly American, mostly nineteenth century, although I took a few side trips into the twentieth century to follow long-term trends. I learned history by watching Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, and Lucy Stone argue, both publicly and privately, while I was disguised as someone from their era.
“In order to ensure”—she glanced at Connor and made a wry face—“or at least try to ensure the sanctity of the timeline, CHRONOS allowed only a limited number of historians. There were thirty-five active historians when I joined in 2298. I took the place of the thirty-sixth, who was retiring. This key is the portable unit that allowed us to return to headquarters when our research was complete. And the diaries were our link in the field—a quick way to get an answer to any question that hadn’t been answered in preliminary research.
“The important point for now,” she said, “is that the altered gene structure allowed me—and through inheritance, allows you—to activate the CHRONOS key. Or the medallion, as you call it. When I was in training, I would hold the key and eventually ‘see’ the surroundings of the set coordinates to which I would be transported. There are a certain number of destination points on each continent, established in areas that we know have been stable points throughout the period we’re examining. For example, one stable point in this area is a corridor in the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol that escaped destruction in the War of 1812—it is a geographic stable point between 1800 and 2092.”
“What happens in 2092?” I asked.
Katherine’s mouth tightened into a firm line. “The corridor ceased to be a stable point.”
“Don’t even bother to push on that,” Connor interrupted. “She’ll go all ‘need-to-know’ on you.”
“To get back to the medallion,” Katherine said, “it allows the user to scope out the territory, make minor temporal adjustments if needed, and determine the best time to make the jump.”
“So how did you wind up here—now? Did you just decide to stay in the past? Or was there an accident of some sort?”
“It certainly wasn’t an accident,” Katherine answered. “It was made to look that way, however. Your grandfather—Saul, your biological grandfather—sabotaged CHRONOS and stranded the teams at their various locations. I was scheduled for a jump to Boston 1853, but… let’s just say I was forced to make a last-minute adjustment. Saul had…”
Katherine paused, phrasing her words carefully. “Saul had fallen in with some bad elements in our society, and I’m quite sure he planned to follow me. He was always a black-and-white sort of person. Either you were friend or you were foe, with no gray area in between. He considered me a traitor, and he would have killed me and—although he wouldn’t have realized it—your mother and Prudence along with me, if I had not ducked into 1969 at the very last minute.”
Over the next hour, I learned how Katherine had started a new life in the 1970s. She emerged in an abandoned barn about a mile outside Woodstock, New York, in mid-August of 1969, taking the place of a music historian friend who had hoped to see Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix at the festival. Dressed in the height of fashion for the 1853 destination for which she’d been scheduled, Katherine was somewhat overdressed for a rock concert. Hoping to get at least some usable data for the friend whose slot she had taken, she removed the pins from her hair, stashed the elaborate gown, gloves, and button-up shoes in her carpetbag, and headed for the concert in just her silk chemise, pantalettes, and a black lace choker. She was still a bit more fully covered than many of the young women at the concert, but after a few hours in the mud and heat, she said, she managed to blend into the crowd.
“I returned to the stable point—the barn—several times over the next few weeks and tried to contact headquarters. But I could see nothing—just a black void with occasional bursts of static. I tried to correspond using one of the diaries that I had packed, but it vanished. It was as though everything from my time no longer existed.”
“So why didn’t you go back to the day before you left?”
Connor nodded. “I asked that, too.”
“You’ve both seen too many movies, I’m afraid. I couldn’t just zip from one location to any other point in time. The CHRONOS key allowed me to emerge at one preprogrammed stable point and then return to CHRONOS headquarters when my work was done. No side trips allowed.
“Fortunately,” she continued, “CHRONOS historians followed the Boy Scout motto: ‘Be Prepared.’ If we could not contact headquarters, we were to find a way to blend in and lie low for a year or two. And, after that point, if we still had no contact with home, we were to give up and try to create normal lives in our new time and place.”
Using a safe-deposit key stitched into her undergarments, Katherine had retrieved the contents of a box initially set up in 1823 with the Bank of New York. She selected the best option from the array of identities inside, invented a husband who had died in the war in Vietnam, and over the next few months secured a university research position.
She had tried to find information about a few of the other historians whose destinations had been the relatively recent past, including Richard, the friend who swapped places with her and landed in 1853. “I would love to know how he managed to blend in after arriving in the bell-bottom jeans and rather loud shirt he was wearing at the time. He would have been perfectly dressed for Woodstock—but I’m sure that he looked rather ridiculous for 1853. Richard was always clever, however. I eventually learned that he edited a newspaper in Ohio for the next forty years, married, had children and grandchildren. That wasn’t protocol—we were told to avoid having children at all costs—but I would imagine that was a bit hard if you were stranded in the 1850s and wanted a normal life.”
She sighed. “He died in 1913. It was strange to read that he had grown old and died so long ago when I’d seen him just a few weeks before. He was a good friend, although I think he’d have liked to be more than that. If I hadn’t been so fixated on Saul…
“Anyway,” she continued, shaking her head as if to clear it, “I sent a letter to the granddaughter who was Richard’s caregiver before he died. I told her I was writing a history on nineteenth-century journalists and her grandfather was one of the people I was researching, and I was surprised when she asked me to visit in person. When I arrived, she went straight to her china cabinet and pulled out a CHRONOS key.
“She said that her grandfather had always been a bit psychic and he told her that one day when she was in her seventies, a woman named Katherine might come asking questions. If that happened, Richard said that she should give me that old medallion and his diary, because I’d know what to do with them.
“I packed Richard’s key away with my other belongings when I married Jimmy, a few months later. He was a young history professor, and I was a newly widowed research assistant, six months pregnant with your mother and Prudence.”
She smiled softly. “Jim should have been born in an era where knights-errant rescued damsels in distress—when he met me, he became a man with a mission. I was reluctant to marry so quickly. CHRONOS members were told to wait at least a year before making the decision on how to best assimilate. But I knew better than the others that this was, in all likelihood, something worse than a mere technical glitch. Jim and I were married before the girls were born and they were, in every sense other than biological, truly his girls. I could not have asked for a more devoted husband and father.”
“So Mom doesn’t know?” I asked. “I mean, even after the accident, you didn’t tell her that Jim wasn’t her father?”
Katherine looked a bit surprised at the suggestion. “Do you really think that I should have told her? She was angry enough at me as it was—telling her a different lie about a father killed in Vietnam was pointless. And telling the truth would just have convinced her that I was insane. I did the only thing I could do after Jim died—I tried to get her sister back from Saul. And I failed.”
Her comment explained so many other things that I found myself unsurprised that Prudence was alive—or at least, that Katherine believed Prudence had survived the crash.
“It never occurred to me that either of the girls might be able to activate the key,” Katherine continued. “There had only been a few generations of CHRONOS historians and… well, it’s not as though we carried CHRONOS equipment around in public. If the children of historians had ever shown an ability to activate the equipment, it wasn’t something I’d been told.
“I kept my key in my jewelry box. I’m not sure why. I wouldn’t have left my family if it had suddenly become active, but I guess it was just a memento—a reminder of a world that seemed almost unreal to me by that time.” She paused for a moment. “And I knew that Saul had made a jump. He was stranded, too. He thought that destroying the stable point on the CHRONOS end would mean that he had free rein—that it would allow him to go from one stable point to the next, from one time to the next, without limits. And it might have worked, but… I still don’t know what happened that day. Wherever, whenever Saul landed, however, I’m quite sure he blames me for wrecking his plans.”
Katherine toyed with the chain around her neck. “I never imagined that the key would be dangerous to the girls. Prudence found it a few months before she disappeared. She and Deborah were looking for old items to use as costumes for a school play. I don’t know how long Prudence held it or what she saw. I do know that she and your mother got into a rather nasty fight because Prudence insisted the medallion was glowing green and your mother couldn’t see it—she was convinced it was another of her sister’s little jokes.”
She was quiet for several seconds. “So what did you do?” I prodded.
“I did what most mothers would have done—I took it away, yelled at both of them, and said I was tired of their silly arguments. I refused to take either side or to discuss the issue when Prudence raised it later.” Katherine’s blue eyes dimmed a bit and she looked down at her hands. “That was a mistake. I know that now. I think she saw something that… troubled her. Maybe it was the same black void that I still see when I try to activate it—but I don’t think so. She started having nightmares and was moody. Well, she was always a bit moody, but… more so… after.”
A tear slid down Katherine’s face, dropping onto her sleeve. “I thought she was getting past it. Then, a few weeks later, I was going to walk into Georgetown with Deborah to buy her some new shoes. It was a Saturday and Jim was taking Prudence to her violin lesson, which was on campus. Prudence had this sneaky look on her face as she got into the car, but I assumed that was because she was wearing a lot more makeup than I usually allowed—Deborah said she had a crush on her violin instructor. As they pulled out of the drive, Prudence gave me a sassy grin and held up something that looked like my CHRONOS key, glowing a soft orange…
“We only had the one car—so following them was out of the question. If it had been a decade later, we would have had cell phones. I could have called and told him to come right back so that I could take the damned thing away from her.
“Instead, I ran to my bedroom and dug through the dresser drawer where I’d hidden the key, and to my surprise, the key was right where I’d left it. I decided that Prudence must have found a similar piece of costume jewelry, and Deborah and I headed downtown as planned. But something kept nagging at me—hadn’t Prudence said the medallion glowed green for her? So why would she have bought costume jewelry that was orange? Still, I couldn’t think of any other explanation.
“And then I remembered the box in the attic,” she said. “We ran back to the house—Deborah was furious, of course, that I had changed my mind after a half-mile walk. Anyway, I found the old trunk with my items from before Jim and I were married—and sure enough, it was open and Richard’s key, the one his granddaughter had given me, was gone.”
Katherine heaved a sigh, then stood and walked into the kitchen. After a few minutes, I heard her let Daphne in. The dog was apparently sensitive to her owner’s mood, because she was far more subdued than I had ever seen her. She padded softly over to the couch and sniffed around in Connor’s lap, looking for gingersnap crumbs, apparently. He fished a cookie from the bottom of the box and tossed it into the air. Daphne caught it with a snap of her jaws and stretched out at my feet, anchoring the prize between her paws and nibbling at the edges.
I was about to follow Katherine into the kitchen, but Connor shook his head. “She’ll be back soon,” he said. “It’s difficult for her to talk about this.”
I nodded. “My mom, too. But I think I know the rest, anyway. Mom said Prudence was never found, and her dad died that evening at the hospital. They don’t know why he lost control of the car. I don’t think Mom even got to talk to him, so I guess he never woke up?”
“He spoke to Katherine. He was in and out of consciousness, and—”
He cut off the sentence as Katherine appeared in the doorway, looking frail and tired. “Jim only spoke for a few seconds. He said, ‘She was there and then she was just gone. The car… I lost control.’ And then he grabbed my hand so tightly and said, ‘Where did she go, Katherine?’ And then Jimmy was gone, too. Not literally, like Prudence, but…”
She ran one hand across her short gray hair and leaned against the wall. “The nurse and Deborah were both in the room. I’m sure they assumed he meant that the river had pulled Prudence away—that he was confused about the order of events. But I saw the look of disbelief in his eyes, Kate. I knew what he meant. She disappeared—and seeing someone vanish from the seat next to you when you’ve never seen anything of the sort… well, I’m not too surprised that Jim forgot about the road.”
Katherine fell silent after that. I didn’t know what to say, and I was relieved when Connor shifted the conversation. “Maybe we should focus on what happened to Kate this morning. Can you tell us any more about the guy who took your bag?”
“My age, maybe a bit older? Kiernan said his name was Simon. He had a black shirt, with something like a band logo on the front, but I didn’t recognize the band. A bit on the chubby side… looked like a hard-core gamer.”
“A gamer?” Katherine asked.
“Out of shape, pale, rarely sees sunlight,” Connor said.
“Yeah,” I said. “He was writing something—kept looking down at his notes. I got a better look at the other guy, actually. Kiernan. Tall…”
“Wait…,” Connor said. He held up his hand and headed for the stairs. “I may be able to save you some effort there.” When he returned a minute later, he was carrying two very old photographs, in identical black frames. He handed one of them to me. “This was taken in 1921.”
It was a formal photo of a family with four children, the youngest boy seated on his mother’s lap. The man was middle-aged, tall and dark with a well-groomed beard. He was looking directly at the camera and I recognized his eyes instantly. I glanced at the woman sitting in front of him and felt a sudden, irrational twinge of jealousy that his hand was on her shoulder. In his other hand he clutched a large, ornate book, perhaps a family Bible, with a ribbon that hung from between the pages.
I handed the photo back to Connor. “It’s him. I’m sure.”
“The second boy from the right,” he said, “the one standing next to the mother? That’s supposedly my grandfather, Anson. I think he was eleven, maybe twelve. The man, as I noted earlier, is Kiernan Dunne, my great-grandfather. Based on the genealogical research that I’ve done recently, Kiernan was a prominent Cyrist Templar in Chicago until his death in the late 1940s. He came over as a child with his parents to work on one of the Cyrist collective farms that sprang up in the Midwest during the mid-1800s.”
I looked again at the picture that Connor held, unsure which bothered me more—that I had been kissed by a married preacher or that he had died more than half a century before I was born. I could still feel the sensation of his lips on mine and his hand on my face, and I could see his smile as he loosened my hair.
I shook my head to clear it, and Connor thrust the other picture into my hand. “I have always believed, however, that this young man is my grandfather Anson.” He pointed to a boy, a bit younger, in another family photo. In this picture, there were three children and a different mother. They were dressed less formally, seated outside in front of a large farmhouse. The man was tall and dark, with a slightly longer beard, and he looked less serious, with just a hint of a smile. The eyes were identical.
“Kiernan had a twin?” I asked.
“No,” said Katherine. “At one point, these were two copies of the same photograph. The second one has been in my possession and under the protection of a CHRONOS field continuously since 1995, when Connor’s mother allowed me to make a copy of the original for my research on the descendants of the various CHRONOS historians. The first one—the more formal portrait—is actually the original photograph that I made this copy from in 1995. Connor obtained it from his sister by mail last May. Except I don’t guess you can really call her his sister, since—”
“Wait, you’re losing me here.” I had no idea what a CHRONOS field was, but there was no way that these photographs were from the same original. “They’re not the same photograph at all. Different people and different locations… how could the second one be a copy of the first?”
“In the stories I remember,” Connor said, “my great-grandfather was a farmer—not a minister, and certainly not a Templar.” I noted the disdain in his voice and was about to inquire further, but he went on, pointing out the differences in the images. “The mother is not the same in this photo. There are slight differences in the children.” Connor nodded toward the staircase. “I can trace the male line in my family on current genealogy sites, but the names are different. My mother never married my father. I was only able to attain that photograph by pretending to be my—what would you call him? He seems to be the version of me in this timeline. My half brother? Half self?” He looked at Katherine, his eyebrows raised in a question.
Katherine just shrugged. “We’re beyond my level of understanding now. I’m just a historian. I used the equipment, but I didn’t invent it. We were told that the system was safeguarded against this type of—aberration—but Saul…”
“Saul,” Connor said with a sneer. “I spend my time now trying to figure out exactly what that bastard has changed and how we might change it back.” He crushed the cookie box, with a bit more force than seemed necessary. “And every day, I see a few more of his bloody temples dotting the landscape.”