Eileen Gunn - Questionable Practices

Or — that’s it! — he could sell his peace symbol. As long as he didn’t have to talk to anybody, and could get by on grunts and nods and smiles, he was sure he’d be okay. Thank God he’d put his clothes back on.

Ralph staked himself out a small space and sat down on the ground. He smoothed the dirt in front of him and put the ceramic medallion down in the center of the smooth space.

People walked by him, and he tried to attract their attention. He coughed, he waved, he gestured at the peace medallion. People ignored him. He would have to work harder, he thought, since he wasn’t willing to say anything. But he was an engineer: sales had never been his strong point.

So Ralph stood up. He held the medallion out to passersby. They turned their heads away.

Ralph was getting hungry. He thought about the salespeople he knew. They didn’t give up: rather, they ingratiated themselves with their potential customers. He looked around nervously.

He noticed a buxom young woman in the crowd, staring at him intently. She was quite a bit older than the girl who had watched him so carefully last time he was here. She was very pretty — maybe he could include her in his sales pitch, and then, after he sold the medallion, he could buy her something safe to eat.

Ralph smiled at her with what he hoped was his most engaging smile and dangled the medallion, swinging it in her direction and then holding it up as though she might like to try it on.

Almost instantly, a crowd formed. Aha! he thought with a grin: the language of commerce is universal. But then he noticed that they were muttering in a very unpleasant tone, picking up stones and glancing in his direction. Whatever they were saying, it sounded like he was in a mess of trouble.

Ralph was getting a little queasy from this rapid temporal disassociation. He didn’t know what is now common knowledge: that the reverse-Schrödinger effect, which creates the dual timeshadow, causes info-seepage from the newly generated parallel self, adding data at a subconscious level.

Superimposition of the time-traveling Ralph over the newly generated stationary Ralph, fixed in the timestream both forward and back, generated a disorienting interference pattern. The traveling Ralph (TR) influenced the stationary Ralph (SR), and vice-versa, though neither was quite aware of the other. Each of them thought he was acting of his own free will — and indeed each one was, for certain values of free.

At any rate, the crowd was ugly, and Ralph didn’t feel so good. So, of his own free will, Ralph bailed, whacking the toolbar without saying good-bye to the young woman or, really, paying much mind to where he was headed.

Washington, DC, 1865.

Ralph looked around groggily. He was in a theater filled with well-dressed, jolly-looking people, sitting in an uncomfortable seat that was covered in a scratchy red wool. It was anything but soft: horsehair stuffing, probably. The stage in front of him was set as a drawing room. It was lit by lights in the floor that illuminated the actor and actresses rather starkly: a funny-looking, coarsely dressed man and two women in elaborate crinoline dresses.

“Augusta, dear, to your room!” commanded the older of the two actresses, pointing imperiously into the wings, stage right.

“Yes, Ma,” the young woman said, giving the man a withering glance. “Nasty beast!” she said to him, and flounced off the stage.

The dialog sounded a bit stilted to Ralph’s ears, but the audience was genially awaiting the older woman’s comeuppance. Our American Cousin , he thought abruptly, that’s the play — it’s been a hit throughout the war.

He glanced up at what was obviously the presidential box: it was twice the size of the other boxes, and the velvet-covered balustrade at its front, overhanging the stage, had been decorated with red-white-and-blue bunting. Just then, President Lincoln leaned forward through the drapery at the front of the box and rested his elbow on the balustrade to catch the next bit of dialog.

Ralph was dumbstruck, and who would not have been? Medieval England, Woodstock, these had been interesting enough places to visit — but seeing Abraham Lincoln — an iconic figure in American history, an instantly recognizable profile, in the flesh, alive, moving, a real human being, on the very day that the long war had come to a close, with a startlingly cheerful smile on his face as he anticipated a famous comic rejoinder — was to Ralph an intensely moving experience.

He held his breath, frozen, as, at the back of the box, unknown to its occupants, he saw a stunningly handsome man — John Wilkes Booth, he was sure — move in against the wall. Booth pulled out a handgun and drew a bead on the president’s head. Without thinking, Ralph leaped to his feet. “Mr. President! Duck!” he shouted.

The gun went off. There were screams and shrieks from the box. A large young man in the presidential party wrestled with Booth, as Lincoln pulled his wife to one side, shielding her. A woman’s voice rang out, “They have shot the president! They have shot the president!” Lincoln clutched his shoulder, puzzled but not seriously hurt. Booth leaped for the stage, but strong men grabbed him as he landed, and brought him down.

Oh, cripes, Ralph thought. I’ve really done it now. This would change the future irrevocably! He would never find his way back to his own time, or anything resembling it. And, panicking, he hit the mental button a third time.

Wessex, 1442.

Ralph looked around at the damned medieval street market. This time, before he could say anything, an attractive dark-haired woman grabbed his upper arm firmly, pulled him close to her, and spoke into his ear. “Keep your mouth shut, if you know what’s good for you,” she whispered urgently. She looked remarkably like the young woman he had seen before, but a bit older and a lot more intense.

She took him by the arm, and led him through the fair. Toothless old women in their forties offered her root vegetables, but she shook her head. Children tried to sell her sweetmeats, but the young woman pushed on. Without seeming to hurry, without drawing attention to herself or him, she quickly led Ralph to the edge of the fair. People who noticed them smiled knowingly, and some of the men gave him a wink. The woman led him behind a hayrick, a seductive look on her face.

Behind the huge mound of hay, the noise of the fair was diminished, and, for the moment at least, they were visible to no one. The woman’s flirtatious manner had vanished. She pushed Ralph away from her and glared at him. Ralph was a little afraid: didn’t people in medieval times hit one another a lot? This woman was mad .

“Ralph, you idiot!” she said in a low but exasperated voice. She’s not speaking Middle English, Ralph thought. Momentarily he wondered: was she a medieval scholar of modern English? Uh….

She looked at him sternly. “People here are smarter than you think! You have to take some precautions! You can’t just show up and expect everyone to ignore you.”

“What?” said Ralph, brilliantly.

“You dunderhead,” she said. “You’re lucky you weren’t burned at the stake. They were waiting for you, or someone like you. Any old time traveler would do.”

“What’s your name?” Ralph asked.

“I’m Sylvie, but that’s not important.”

“It’s important to me,” said Ralph.

She shook off his attention. “Come with me. Don’t say a word, don’t even open your mouth.”

“But how did you know?” said Ralph. “How do you know I’m a time traveler? Why do you speak a language I can understand?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Sylvie. “You were the first, but you’re not the only. Historians of time travel come here all the time, to see where you landed on that very first trip. The locals are getting restless. They flayed those travelers they identified, or they burned them, or they pressed them to death with stones. We couldn’t let that happen to you, especially before you told us how it worked.”