Nine Eleven Page 2

  “My nighttimes are pretty bad,” Lara said, derailing Moms’s prepared speech.

  “What?” Moms said.

  “My dreams. They all wanted to get into my dreams.”

  “Who?” Moms asked.

  “The Russians. The people before the Russians. The Fifth Floor.”

  “What’s the Fifth Floor?” Moms asked.

  Lara shook her head.

  “Why did they want to get into your dreams?” Eagle asked.

  Lara shrugged. “They wanted to figure out what makes me tick.”

  “Do you know what makes you tick?” Moms asked.

  “Nope.” Lara smiled. “Sorry. I interrupted your spiel. Defending the wall, and all that.” She was a small girl of sixteen, too thin, light fuzz finally growing back on her head, but not enough to cover the jigsaw of scars on her skull.

  Moms regrouped and continued. “We used to be the Nightstalkers, stationed outside Area 51.” As Lara opened her mouth to say something, Moms answered the question before it was uttered. “Yes, there is an Area 51. No, there aren’t aliens there, at least not in the way most people think of them. But, yes, there’s some really weird stuff. We dealt a lot with Rifts, rips in the space-time continuum, much like the Gates we go through now. Things came through the Rifts, and we had to stop them and shut the openings. We finally closed them for good. Now—”

  “Who made the Rifts?” Lara asked. “This Shadow thingamajig?”

  Moms sighed. “Scientists. Our scientists. Messing with physics they didn’t understand. It all started at Area 51 with the original Demon Core from the Trinity Test, and—” She stopped. “It’s a long story, and we’ll fill you in on it some other time, because we don’t deal with Rifts any more. Now, we’re the Time Patrol. But some things are the same. One of them is something we call Why We are Here.”

  “To man the walls,” Lara said.

  Moms forced a smile. “We stand watch. Protecting our timeline from the Shadow and what it sends against our past. To keep our present, our world, intact.”

  Lara nodded. “Okay. Beats having someone drill into your skull. I mean, like, literally. It sucks.”

  “We normally have a naming ceremony,” Eagle said, “because when we joined the Nightstalkers, and now the Time Patrol, we left our pasts, who we were, our names, everything, behind.”

  “I figured Moms and Eagle wasn’t your real names,” Lara said. “I mean, that would be a bit weird, right? What kind of parents would do that to a kid?”

  “A Boy Named Sue,” Eagle said.

  “Love Johnny Cash,” Lara said. “I Hurt Myself. Used to listen to that a lot. ‘Course, he didn’t write it; Nine Inch Nails did. But you could tell he knew it.”

  Eagle and Moms exchanged another worried look.

  Moms spoke. “We were given our names by the rest of the team.”

  “I got a name,” Lara said.

  “Colonel Orlando told us he gave you a name when you landed near Area 51,” Moms said, “but then we found out that’s your real name.”

  “Is it?” Lara asked. “I mean, I think that’s my real name, but I’ve had other names. Especially in my dreams, except they seem real, not dreams. You know?”

  Eagle answered. “We don’t have much in your file, but it does say Lara is your real name. How did you get Orlando to give you your real name when he’s never looked at your file?”

  Lara shrugged. “How did I get that priestess long ago in Greece to stop Pythagoras from going in to see the Delphic Oracle and getting whacked?”

  “That’s something else we all would like to know.”

  “I’m part of we all now,” Lara said. “Count me in on wanting to know.”

  “Do you want to have a new name?” Moms asked. “Leave your past behind?”

  “I’d love to.” Lara looked down at the table, staring at her chewed-up nails as if they held an answer. “But I can’t.” She pointed at her head. “It’s in there somewhere. All messed up. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not.” She looked up. “Moms. They already knew you were gonna take care of everyone, didn’t they?” She shifted her gaze. “And Eagle. You fly?”

  “I’m a pilot,” Eagle said.

  “He also has a tremendous memory,” Moms said. “I voted for Einstein, but the rest of the team liked Eagle.”

  “It does have a tougher ring to it,” Lara agreed. “Might get teased on the playground being called Einstein.”

  “We don’t know your background,” Moms said. “Most of us, except Ivar and Scout, came out of the military. So we shared that. Now that we have a little bit of time, we wanted to welcome you to the Time Patrol.”

  “Thanks,” Lara said. She frowned. “You know, no one ever really welcomed me anywhere before.”

  “Ever?” Eagle asked.

  “Not that I can recall. Course, when you’re in a straitjacket, most people you meet aren’t the welcoming kind.”

  Moms spoke. “When I was in the army, every unit I went into, it was a series of warnings. Behave. Don’t screw up. Don’t do this. Don’t do that.”

  “The Army sounds a lot like the loony bin,” Lara said.

  “Touché,” Eagle said.

  “But we are happy to have you,” Moms said.

  Lara indicated the two names carved into the top of the desk. “Looks like you needed replacements.”

  Moms recoiled ever so slightly, but Lara noticed.

  “Didn’t mean nothing bad by that,” Lara said. “I tend to say whatever pops into my head without filtering it. And those shrinks thought they had to dig for it. Literally.”

  Moms regrouped. “We haven’t had time to write out Protocols for the Time Patrol yet.” She reached into the pocket of her bland gray jumpsuit then pulled out an acetate notebook. “This is the old Nightstalker Protocol. It will give you an idea of how we operate.” She handed it to Lara.

  “My Team Leader letter is at the start,” Moms said. “First and foremost. The most basic tenet of teamwork is honesty.”

  “I thought we went on these missions alone,” Lara said, flipping through the little book.

  “We’re still a team,” Eagle said.

  “Sure,” Lara replied. She put the Protocol down on the table.

  Moms plowed ahead. “Everyone on the team is a leader.”

  “But you’re in charge, aren’t you?” Lara had the slightest hint of a grin.

  “I am,” Moms agreed, “but, as you noted, on a mission, you’re in charge. You make the decisions.”

  “Okay.” Lara indicated the Protocol, but didn’t pick it up. “So the next one has that exception, too? The one where We do everything as a team?”

  “Yeah,” Moms said. She turned to Eagle, questioning.

  “What’s on the next page?” Eagle asked Lara.

  “More sayings from some guy named Nada,” Lara replied.

  “You didn’t even read it,” Moms said.

  “I read it,” Lara said. “You saw me. I looked at every page.”

  “Do you have an eidetic memory?” Eagle asked.

  Lara frowned. “Say what?”

  “Commonly referred to as a photographic memory,” Eagle said.

  Lara shrugged. “I just know what’s in it after I looked at it. It’s not like a photo. I just know.”

  “Okay.” Eagle nodded. “Then that page. Those sayings were Nada’s, but they’re still applicable. First one: Nothing is impossible to the man who doesn’t have to do it.”

  Lara laughed. “I like that. He must have been a hell of a time at a party.”

  “Not exactly,” Moms said.

  “You can read”—Eagle paused—“and go over the rest in your head. But Rule One of Time Patrol isn’t in there.”

  “And that is...?” Lara asked.

  “Never tell anyone about Time Patrol. When you’re on your mission, or when you’re back in our present timeline.”

  “Sort of like Fight Club, right?”

  “Sort of,” Eagle said. “Except tha
t was a book, and this is real.”

  “It was a movie,” Lara said.

  Eagle sighed.

  “So it was a book, too?” Lara asked. “I’ll have to check it out.”

  “Lara?” Moms said.

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re on your side.” She indicated their surroundings. “Dane, the analysts, Edith, Colonel Orlando, Frasier, all of the others? They’re not the team. The team is you, me, Eagle, Doc, Ivar, Roland, and Scout. That’s it. We take care of each other, no matter what.”

  “Even if I gotta break Rule One?” Lara asked.

  Eagle and Moms exchanged another look.

  “Yes,” Moms said. “Even if we have to do that. Team first.”

  New York City

  Early morning was Edith Frobish’s favorite time in Central Park. The slice of dawn before the hordes of tourists came wandering about, aimlessly taking pictures they would add to the thousands of others in their device memories, rarely to look at them again. Or worse, they’d inflict the images on friends and relatives as proof of visit, more than a testament to appreciation of the actual vision. For Edith, the vision, the aura, the sensation, was everything. Here, standing in front of this towering relic of antiquity, Edith could literally breathe history. She was behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, aka the Met, across East Drive. Edith visited this spot every day she was in New York and in the now, not the wherever and whenever of the Possibility Palace.

  Cleopatra’s Needle has weathered the gaze of hundreds of generations in its various locations over the past three and a half millennia. Edith stood five meters away, close enough to make out some of the weathered hieroglyphics inscribed on one of the four sides, but far enough to appreciate the size of the obelisk. It is a single piece of granite, over twenty-one meters high. She marveled not only at the skill of the ancient Egyptians who carved this block of stone out of solid rock, moved it, inscribed it, and lifted it, but also the more modern entrepreneurs who’d hauled it here by boat, across the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic, in the latter nineteenth century. Ships were smaller in those days, and transporting an object this big, weighing over two hundred and twenty tons, hadn’t been easy. Then there were the 122 days it took to get it from the dock on the Hudson River to the center of Manhattan in 1881. Edith could regale anyone interested with the entire story, foot by excruciating foot, across an island very different from the current metropolis.

  Not many people were interested, and when someone asked, Edith usually only managed to get the obelisk halfway across the Atlantic before they lost interest. A handful of men, enticed by her long, lean figure and exquisite ballerina’s neck, had weathered the stone’s journey over the Atlantic to the dock, and even across Manhattan to Central Park, but always in vain, exiting her apartment unfulfilled in the way they were most interested, but certainly with more knowledge than when they’d entered. Edith always wondered afterward what had driven them off, not realizing she hadn’t driven them off, but never really invited them in.

  Not many people had Edith’s attention to detail and total commitment to duty, which was why she was a member of the Time Patrol. Edith held dual Ph.Ds from Columbia in art and history. Since art is a recorder of history, it made perfect sense how her interests were intertwined and of such importance to the Time Patrol, whose primary mission is to maintain their timeline’s history at all costs.

  Not only did Cleopatra’s Needle represent art, it represented to Edith the fallacy of the way men thought, substituting rumor for fact, emotion for logic, stories for history. According to Wikipedia, Edith’s factual nemesis, there were three ‘Cleopatra’s Needles, ’ the others in London and Paris.

  But the three weren’t a set. One could consider the one in London part of a set with this one, similar in size, and more importantly also commissioned by the Pharaoh Thutmose, and both originally from Heliopolis, Egypt. But the one in Paris had been commissioned by Pharaoh Ramesses II, some time after old Thutmose’s two, and was originally located in Luxor.

  So. Not a set. Details were important. At least to people like Edith.

  Worse, all three had nothing to do with Cleopatra VII, who’d come along a thousand years after they were made. Based on history and supported by Moms’s debriefing, who had actually met Cleopatra during her Ides Mission, the Egyptian had been a wicked piece of work. Cleopatra hadn’t been very vested in Caesar’s health, according to Moms, and had a good idea what awaited him on his journey to the Senate on 15 March, 44 B.C. Cleopatra had already been planning her post-Caesar manuevers, which—

  “Everything the same?”

  Edith startled, even though she recognized the voice: Dane, Administrator of the Time Patrol. He stood just behind her.

  “Yes. As far as I can tell,” she amended, in order to be precise, since she hadn’t checked the other three sides of the obelisk.

  “How was Greece?” Dane asked.

  Edith turned to face him. “The Charioteer of Delphi is back in the museum. Never missed. Even the security footage doesn’t show it reappearing.”

  “Strange, isn’t it?” Dane said.

  Edith wasn’t quite sure if that was a question or an observation, or what exactly he was designating as ‘strange. ’ That a sculpture which had disappeared was back? That it had been gone as if it never existed, with security footage confirming the disappearance, yet now, all was as if it had never happened, even the footage? ‘Strange’ was an adjective that could describe every aspect of the Time Patrol.

  When she didn’t respond, Dane clarified. “The statue rebooted, the timeline rebooted, but only in those things affected by the event: Pythagoras’s death.”

  “Pythagoras the sculptor,” Edith corrected automatically, differentiating him from the more famous Pythagoras of Theorem fame.

  Dane wasn’t one of those irritated by her attention to detail. “And the nuances in the other art you noticed...?”

  “Gone,” Edith said. “I filed a report,” she added, a smidge defensively.

  “I read it,” Dane said.

  Then why ask? Edith thought, but would never, ever, say aloud. “How did you do it?” she asked instead. “Reboot art?”

  “We didn’t reboot art,” Dane said. “We kept a single artist, two thousand years ago, from getting killed when he shouldn’t have been killed. In essence, we stopped a change. Which appears to be much easier than implementing one.”

  “But how?”

  “Lara,” Dane said. “Our newest member of the Time Patrol.”

  “How did she do it?”

  The sun had risen above the bulk of the Met to the east. New York City was growing louder by the moment. Joggers huffed past on the nearby road through the Park. Two tourists walked up, consulting a map, took a quick succession of selfies using those sticks Edith detested and the Met had banned, then hurried on, getting an early start on their checklist of places to visit.

  Dane sighed, and he looked old, very old. “Lara says she sent a message through time to a priestess at the Oracle of Delphi to delay Pythagoras a few moments. Enough of a message that Pandora didn’t kill him in the Corycian Cave. Technically, Lara said it was more a ‘vibe’ than an actual message.”

  “How?” Edith insisted. “We can get messages from the past, but we can’t send one back. Especially not one that initiates action. That’s why the team members have to go on the missions.”

  “We don’t know how she did it,” Dane admitted. “Lara is...different.” He was unusually reflective. “Even Lara can’t explain how she did it. She just knows she did it.”

  Edith shook her head. “It’s not right. It’s a paradox. Scout went on her mission. She appeared in 478 B.C. in Delphi just after Pythagoras was killed. Now, he wasn’t killed. But her mission result is the same, correct?”

  “A paradox?” Dane indicated a nearby bench. “I’m tired, Edith. Can we sit?” He didn’t wait for a response. He settled down with a deep sigh. “My legs ache almost all the time. Part of getting old. The p
assage of time. We travel in it, but we can’t stop it. That’s irony, which is cousin to paradox. Language, Edith, language is the key. It’s what ultimately made us different from other animals. Language is a form of art. A way to communicate thoughts and ideas and emotions. So I pay particular attention to words.”

  Edith sat next to him, her back perfectly straight, braced for the whack of the nun’s ruler.

  “Paradox?” Dane repeated. “There are several definitions, of course, depending on what you consult. I know how much you dislike Wikipedia. It says a paradox is a statement that, despite apparently sound reasoning from true premises, leads to a self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion. I memorized it,” Dane added, “because it shows the currently accepted definition. Note the word unacceptable. Who determines what’s accepted and what isn’t?

  “But there is the more classical definition, more accurate to the true meaning of the word. That a paradox is a statement that is seemingly contradictory or against common sense, and yet is perhaps true. The difference between those two definitions is where we, the Time Patrol, exist. In the truth. Reality.”

  “We operate in the perhaps,” Edith said.

  Dane undid three buttons at the top of his shirt. He pulled the cloth aside to reveal a knotted scar which angled across his chest. “Your Dane, the Dane from this timeline, died of this wound in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. But your timeline still exists. Does that make sense?” He buttoned the shirt. “I survived the wound, but my timeline is gone. Everyone. Billions. Wiped out by the Shadow. There is no ‘perhaps’ for me, Edith. This is a fight for survival.”

  “How did you get to our timeline?” Edith dared to ask.

  “Through the Space Between,” Dane said.

  “Why you?”

  A ghost of a smile graced Dane’s lips. “Like Lara, I don’t know. I was chosen for some reason.”

  “By who?”

  Dane shrugged. “The Ones Before? The Fates? Luck? No clue.” He stood. “I’m heading back.” He glanced at her battered leather satchel. “Do you have anything interesting you’re bringing back from your trip?”