Weighing Shadows Read online

  “You’re going to learn to speak Kaphtoran in your language class,” said Strickland. “It was spoken on Kaphtor for about a thousand years, from 2500 to 1500 BCE, and it—”

  “Wait a minute,” Franny said. “No one knows what they spoke there. It’s what they call Linear A, isn’t it? There are fragments of it, but it’s never been translated.”

  “Well,” said Strickland. “That’s the advantage of having a time machine.”

  No one spoke for a long moment. “Why, though?” Ann asked finally. “Why are you doing all this?”

  “I can only give you the outlines of our program,” the professor said. “You’ll learn more when you’ve been here longer. What happened is, well, things go very badly wrong in the future. The climate changes drastically, there are food shortages, and then a few countries get into a nuclear war over resources. There’s starvation, plague, genocide, with huge numbers of people dying …”

  “Wait a minute,” Franny said again. “You’re from the future?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But—but what are you doing here?”

  “I’m getting to that. Our goal is, well, we’re trying to make things right. We’re going back and changing one or two things, performing some very small modifications, but the changes we make widen out, grow greater over time. And because of what we do, history is different, it turns out for the better.”

  “Why don’t you just send people from your own time to change things?”

  Strickland hesitated. “We—well, we’re still struggling in our time,” she said. “We don’t have enough people to spare, for one thing. The most intelligent people we have are needed to do work there—we can’t afford to lose them. So we came back here, to a time where we can take a few bright people from the population who won’t be missed.”

  Thanks a lot, Ann thought. Though she had to admit that at least in her case it was probably true that no one would miss her. Even Sam hadn’t seemed that sorry to see her go, when she’d given him her notice.

  “What year do you come from?” she asked.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Strickland said. “You can only know enough about the future as we think is safe.”

  “So is that what you want us to do? Go back in time and change things?”

  “That’s right. We’ll ask you to make only small changes, though—move a vase from one room to another, or keep someone from getting to work on time. It isn’t dangerous— you don’t have to worry about that. Though of course you’ll have to be careful.”

  Every day brought some new marvel. They watched holographic videos in their history class, videos that had been taken on Kaphtor by mobile cameras sent into the past. “The cameras look like flying insects—you’ll probably see a few of them when you’re there,” Strickland explained. “Unfortunately we can’t control them from the present—the best we can do is send them to a tace we’re interested in and program them to come back. They home in on heat signatures, on groups of people. Then when they return we pull the data they’ve recorded. So our knowledge is a bit limited, but you’ll know everything you’ll need for a brief visit.”

  They took a drug that enhanced their ability to learn, and they were all speaking the Kaphtoran language after a month of study, though none of them was fluent. And they were introduced to another sort of language, one invented by the time travelers themselves, with words like “tace” for “time and place,” and “thern” for “there and then.” The language had extra tenses too, for events that had happened but had been erased, or events that existed but that the company planned to erase in the future.

  The drug also made it easier to learn about the history of Kaphtor, and Ann grew fascinated by their customs, their society. Women wore long, frilled skirts, and blouses that opened in a V to their waist and left their breasts bare. The men were slender, athletic. They danced with bulls, they sailed to distant places, their art was renowned throughout the Mediterranean.

  She worried about the open blouses, though it was not her breasts she feared exposing but her scars. She was working her way up to asking about them when Franny brought the subject up in their history class. Franny looked at Gregory as she spoke, as if daring him to laugh or make some lewd comment, but he seemed as serious as she was.

  “We don’t know what your cover story is yet,” Professor Strickland said. “But one thing I do know is that you won’t be from Kaphtor—you won’t know enough to get away with that. Probably you’ll be from Egypt, or Asia Minor. So no, you won’t be wearing those blouses.”

  She returned to her lesson. “People out there don’t know a lot about Kaphtor,” she said, indicating the world beyond Transformations with a wave of her hand. “If they’ve heard of ancient Crete at all they think the inhabitants were called Minoans, because the man who discovered the ruins, Sir Arthur Evans, named them that, after King Minos. And they might have a vague memory of the myth of King Minos, who sent young people into the labyrinth to be killed by the Minotaur. In fact there was no King Minos—as I’ve said before, Kaphtor was a matriarchy, ruled by a queen. The word Minos was an honorific—there were men who were called ‘the Minos,’ which means Moon God.

  “Even people who study Kaphtor don’t know much about it. Some of that is because we’re in the process of changing its history, because history itself is in flux. So if you read books in outside libraries you’ll learn that civilization ended on Kaphtor because a volcano erupted on a nearby island, or because people revolted against the aristocracy in the palaces, or because the Achaeans, the ancient Greeks, invaded.”

  Ann felt a thrill at her words. She had always felt on the outside of things, looking in, had always wondered what it would be like to be part of an elite, someone in the know.

  “The volcano isn’t going to go off while we’re on our assignment, is it?” Gregory asked.

  Strickland laughed. “No, we wouldn’t do that to you. The volcano erupted thirty years before your insertion. Some parts of Kaphtor still haven’t been rebuilt, meaning it’ll be easier to carry out your assignment.”

  “So what’s our assignment?” Franny asked.

  “We don’t tell you that until you’re in the field, actually,” Strickland said. “The knowledge might change the way you act, make you self-conscious. Your Facilitator knows, and he or she will tell you what your specific tasks are.”

  “What about paradoxes?” Ann asked.

  “What about them?” Strickland said.

  “Well, when history changes, that means things change in the present, doesn’t it? Can we change things so much that out parents don’t meet, or our grandparents, and we end up not existing? And won’t other people notice that things aren’t the same? Or do we end up in a parallel world, where the present is different?”

  “No, we’ll still be in our world, this world. There wouldn’t be much point in changing things if we weren’t. As for things changing, and people noticing, well, as we told you, we only make very slight changes. There will be some small differences here, but no one outside Transformations will realize it. They’ll think it’s the way it’s always been.”

  She smiled at them. “We’ll feel it on the campus, though. You might have already felt a timeshift. The ground seems to move under you, like an earthquake.”

  They shook their heads. None of them had experienced a timeshift yet.

  “If we changed something important, something that’s in the history books and everyone knows about, the timequake would be huge,” Professor Strickland went on. “If we went back in time and saved Lincoln, for example, or Kennedy— they’d feel it all through North America, maybe the world. That’s why we only make small changes, and let the changes accumulate, add up. We don’t want people becoming aware of what we’re doing here.”

  Why not? Ann wondered. The company had already warned them not to share their knowledge with the world outside. Probably everyone would want to get their hands on a time machine if they knew about them; things would bec
ome chaotic pretty quickly

  GREGORY HAD STARTED JOINING them at lunch, and they all pressed him for what he knew about the company and their travels in time. “Whern did they send you?” Franny asked.

  “The Spanish Inquisition, the first time,” Gregory said. He was as good-looking as a model, Ann thought, dark-haired but with startling blue eyes.

  “Wow,” Franny said. “That must have been scary.”

  “You know, it wasn’t, not really. I was a priest from Rome, making sure that the other priests were following orders. People were afraid of me, not the other way around.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Jerry said.

  Gregory shook his head. “I didn’t like it. Everyone was so terrified, all the time. They even smelled terrified—you could smell their sweat, and the mold in the prisons. I gotta tell you, I can’t wait for Kaphtor. Sunlight and oceans. And I always liked the Greek gods and goddesses, Kore and Demeter …”

  Ann would rather hear about Gregory’s experiences, though; they’d talked enough about Kaphtor in class. So did Zach, it seemed, because he said, “So what did you do in Spain? Did you rescue someone, break them out of jail?”

  “I had to cut through an axle on a cart, that’s all. And before you ask me, no, I don’t know why. Someone had to be stopped from getting somewhere, that’s all I know.”

  “But Professor Strickland said—well, she said that we’ll be debriefed when we get back,” Ann said. “I mean, didn’t they tell you anything?”

  “I thought they would. But all they told me was that it worked out, whatever it was.”

  Ann sighed. If Gregory didn’t know the answers to their questions, who would? “Why are they so secretive?” she asked.

  “I wondered about that too,” Franny said. “Do you think they’re telling the truth, about being from the future?”

  “What else could they be?” Gregory said.

  “I don’t know,” Ann said. “One of those Internet hoaxes, maybe. You know—‘We come from the future to save you.’”

  “Why would they go to all this trouble—”

  “Or a cult. Like when Strickland said they’ll tell us more when we’ve been here longer. Like they’re stringing us along, until suddenly we’re all dressing the same and going door to door handing out pamphlets.”

  “Believe me, they’re what they say they are. I really did go to Spain in the sixteenth century. And where else would they get all this technology?”

  “I haven’t seen any technology yet,” Ann said.

  “What—you want some guy in a blue box to land here in the courtyard?” Franny asked. “I don’t think it’s as easy as that.”

  “What about that drug they give us?” Jerry asked. “I had a look at it, in the lab. And, well, it isn’t based on anything I know about. It has to have come from the future.”

  “Are you a chemist?” Franny asked.

  “Something like that,” Jerry said.

  Franny frowned at the evasion, but Ann thought she could guess why he hadn’t answered her. He had been manufacturing drugs, or something just as illegal. The people at Transformations weren’t the only ones with secrets, she thought. Everyone here probably had a history they wanted to keep to themselves.

  Ann had another question, but it wasn’t one she wanted to share with the others. It had taken her a week after Professor Das’s first time travel experiment to think of it, something that surprised her later, since the subject was usually at the forefront of her mind. Would it be possible to travel back to when she was born, see how she had gotten her scars? Could she finally get answers to the questions she had wondered about for so long? Who was her mother? Why had she given her up?

  The conversation had moved on, and she tried to pay attention. “So where did they get the money for all this?” Jerry was asking, sweeping a hand at the complex in front of him. “The campus, and all the equipment—”

  “Oh, man, you never read any science fiction, did you?” Zach asked. “They play the stock market, and bet on the races. It’s easy if you know what’s going to happen.”

  “I still think there’s something strange here,” Franny said. “Something stranger than just time travel, I mean.”

  “So what, you’re going to back out?” Gregory said.

  “Hell no,” Franny said, smiling at him. “I can’t wait to see Kaphtor.”

  A MONTH LATER PROFESSOR Strickland led her three students to a part of the complex they had never seen before, two floors up and through a long corridor. At the end of it they found a room filled with racks of clothing.

  “Costumes!” Franny said.

  “We don’t want you to think of these as costumes,” the professor said, though she was smiling as she said it. “They’re your clothes, what you’ll be wearing on your assignment. You’re traders from Egypt, like I told you in class, but from Thebes, far to the south, beyond where anyone from Kaphtor has ever been. So you won’t have to answer too many awkward questions.” She smiled again. “And you can keep your names, your first names—no one will know what names from that place sound like.”

  She took a hanger down from one of the racks. It held a dress that looked surprisingly modern, a white linen shift with straps about an inch wide over the shoulders. She handed it to Ann and brought out another one, nearly identical, for Franny. “These were generally tighter, but we wanted you to have more freedom of movement,” she said.

  Gregory was given clothes from another rack, a pleated kilt and a nearly transparent shirt that tied at the neck, with wide pleated sleeves that fell in ordered waves to his elbows. Then they went over to a part of the room filled with rows and rows of shoes, and Strickland pointed to a rack of leather sandals. “Pick out a pair in your size, then try everything on, see if it fits,” she said.

  They each had a changing room, to Ann’s relief. She pulled the dress over her head and slipped on the sandals, then looked up into the mirror.

  The person who looked back at her seemed a stranger, a traveler from distant lands. A woman who sailed by the stars, with jasper in her hold, and carnelian, and rare perfume, coming back to Egypt with carved ivory and silver jewelry and beaten bronze. The gown left her shoulders bare, exposing one of her scars, but even that looked as if it belonged, evidence of her journeys.

  And yet—wasn’t she too pale? Wouldn’t someone from Egypt be darker? Her initial delight began to fade.

  She left the changing room diffidently. Franny and Gregory were coming out now, murmuring and feeling the fine linen of their clothing.

  “Wow, look at Greg!” Franny whispered, nudging her. His kilt showed off the calves of his legs, which were roped with muscle.

  It would never occur to Ann to express an interest in a man like Gregory, someone so far out of her reach he might as well be in another galaxy. Franny, though, she might be good-looking enough for him.

  Now Ann remembered how much attention Franny had paid to Gregory at their lunches, how she had hung on his words as though he were the most fascinating person on earth. She felt a touch of sadness; she had enjoyed having Franny as a friend, and now Franny would probably start spending all of her time with him. It was a good thing she had not gotten close to Franny, or any of her fellow students.

  “I look much too white for someone from Egypt,” she said.

  “Not at all,” Strickland said, overhearing her. “Don’t you remember? The ideal for women in Kaphtor is white, pale white, and the men are dark red. That’s what we saw in the frescos, but of course the videos showed a different story— not everyone lives up to the ideal, in any timestream. Anyway, we want you to look enough like the people of Kaphtor to fit in, but different enough that you’ll be taken for travelers. They’ll think that you and Franny are perfect, beautiful. Gregory—” She studied him and then said, “We’ll have to make you up a bit, give you some coloring.”

  Perfect, beautiful. No one had ever used those words about her before. They stayed with her, even after Professor Strickland told her that
her hair was too thin and light, that they would need to give her a wig.

  FRANNY ATE LUNCH WITH Greg the next day. Ann saw them walking to the cafeteria and laughing, but she was too excited to give it much thought. They were going to be briefed a final time that afternoon, and then leave the next day.

  To Ann’s surprise Emra Walker joined them at the briefing. She would be the Facilitator on this trip, she said, going with them to make sure everything went according to plan.

  “We’ll be meeting three other people from Transformations in Kaphtor, Preparers who left this morning and arrived thern a month before you do,” she said. Ann blinked as the chronology twisted within her mind and then straightened out. “Their names are Meret Haas, Yaniel Elias, and Amabel Da Silva, and they’ve prepared the way for you. You haven’t met them here on campus because we want the people on Kaphtor to think that they’re strangers to us, and the best way to do that is for them to actually be strangers. Nevertheless, if you have any trouble and you can’t find me, they’ll be available to help.”

  She showed them holographic videos of the three earlier travelers, and Ann tried to memorize their features. Meret Haas was a thin black woman with sharp cheekbones, a high arched nose, and long graying braids. Yaniel Elias had slightly lighter skin, black too perhaps, or Hispanic. He had shaved his head and, as if to make up for the lack of hair, had grown a huge mustache. Da Silva was white, a little plump, with dark hair piled on top of her head. All of them were older than Ann and her fellow students, in their thirties or forties.

  Ann wondered briefly if Haas and Elias would stand out on Kaphtor. No, that was stupid, and probably racist besides—the company had to know what they were doing, know that it would be safe to send them into the past.

  Walker went over the biographies the company had fabricated for Haas, Elias, and Da Silva, then said, “We’ll be going to the palace in Knossos, and talking to a man called the Minos.”

  “And then what?” Ann asked.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Walker said. “We want you to act naturally, with no preconceptions.”