SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

He rolled over.

Nice work if you can get it.

Claudette woke him up early the next day.

“Hell’s all that pounding?” he bellowed. “I know it’s a big day but contain your enthusiasm.”

He opened the door. She said, “We got big troubles,” and moved inside. She was not alone. Two more agents were with her: the Somali, Arliyo Gaal, and one of the elders of the group, a redhead with more stories to tell than there was time in the sky, Fiona Carel.

“Existential or physical?” he asked. That’d be helpful in deciding which guns to pack.

Claudette held out a folded three-by-five card. “This was on the bar at breakfast.”

Someone had written HT on it.

“That guy was American,” said Syndell. The ladies watched him and waited for him to catch up.

“HT,” he said.

Claudette snatched the card back. “Harriet Tubman.”

“No frikking way.” Son of a bitch. “If they were going after Tubman, they were crazy. No way would the Difference Machine let them anywhere near her,” he said.

Clearly this gathering thought otherwise.

“The Machine does weird things sometimes,” said Claudette.

“But it never tries to commit suicide. Arliyo, Fiona: you think this means Ms. Tubman?”

“I do,” said Aliyo. Fiona nodded.

“The Machine plants tests of our resolve,” said Arliyo.

Syndell hated cat and mouse. “All right. Let’s find the bloke.” He placed hands on Arliyo’s shoulders and touched forehead to forehead. She was an excellent person. “Li, I’m truly sorry for anything that happens then.”

Dorchester County, Maryland’s cold season was, wet, uncomfortable and loud. Industrialization, thought Syndell spitting out an errant splash from the constant bits kicked up by horse, carriage, and a high wind.

March, Eighteen twenty-two. Tubman’s birth date.

They’d protect her. Birth to death. It was what agents did. It was the worst thing and best thing about time travel. You’d live and age in the past or future but the moment Time returned you where it liked you best you were you again, full of heavy memories. There were no old Agents of Change. Just a lot of dead ones.

“This thing rides up a bit, dunnit,” said Syndell outfitted in the breeches of the time.

“Don’t be flip,” said Arliyo, stripped to the waist and unkempt. Her unblemished brown skin was entrancing. Claudette’s freckled pink skin was entrancing. Even the backs of Syndell’s pasty pale hands were entrancing.

He did not want to go.

“We’re about to enter hell,” said Arliyo.

There were rules to the game, deep-conditioned ones. None of this going-after-the-grandfather business. Even a supercomputer got bored with infinite permutations. It was direct or nothing.

This was the height of this particular country’s insane clamor for supremacy. Truths held self-evident. All created equal. Generations enslaved.

They had to sell Arliyo to the family enslaving Harriet’s family.

Syndell cried hard that night.

He and his new wife Claudette became fast and wealthy friends of the piggish, unthinking bastards in that large house. They had property adjacent. Unable to bear children they took interest even in the Negro children, particularly baby Harriet.

No one was better protected, no one more closely watched, than one quiet, genius child. Syndell often caught the little one watching his and Claudette’s interactions. It was as if she knew. Arliyo grew old over the years. Scarred and angry but always Arliyo. Scores of agents came through as needed, yet not a one was brave enough to attempt to alter the vision of what was clearly becoming madam Tubman’s plan.

She charmed the displaced. The hurt. The Shawnee. Ibo. Pawnee. Zulu, Beijing. No one in the large houses that bartered her off as she matured saw the roads to freedom she laid.

But never once an attack on her life traceable to an agent.

Every night Syndell made love to Claudette. It was that or grow mad seeing another mark on Arliyo.

They all grew old.

By Harriet’s forty-first birthday, after the Underground Rebellion led to the surrender by Lincoln to the Free Displaced Confederacy and all plantations burned—every single one after a long war that left a million dead and a million more likely under the scientific advances at Tubman’s command—every agent knew it was time to go home.

Instead of red, the herring had been gold. No matter.

If the United States of America had been allowed to continue unchecked the world would have likely ended in nineteen fourteen.

They returned to the pub. Syndell looked at Claudette two months after that.

My gods, we were married for 42 years.

“Remember that book,” he said to her. “Before we left. Nineteen Eighty-four. What’s that about?”

They were in his apartment. She laid a hand on his face. “It’s about love.”

A tear tracked down his face. “We were in hell, Claude. A whole life.”

“It fades.”

“What about Arliyo?” he said.

“In no more pain than the last guy we dumped off Dover,” she said.

“I’m done.”

“The Machine hasn’t decommissioned you,” said Claudette.

“What did we make a difference to? A machine trying to maintain its immortality?”

“You planning to walk?” she said, seeing him through memories of the man as her husband.

“Yeah.”

“Right then. I’ll pack up with you.”

“I don’t know where I’m going, luv,” said Syndell.

“Does it make a difference?” she said.

He looked at Claudette. Her skin was rosy, her freckles plentiful, her eyes forever warm. “You sure you’re coming with me?”

“Aye.”

“Then I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Arliyo found Syndell’s handwritten notes after his disappearance.

I hold these truths to be self-evident. That time is a bollocks. That the Difference Machine is a sham. That Claudette is better for me than I deserve.

The notes were turned over to the Machine, which read them with a sense of pride. Syndell was not the finest agent, but he could read a blueprint with the best of them. The Machine would have Arliyo, undisputedly the best, find him after enough positive aspects of his absence had presented themselves. For now, let the man walk. Let him think he was disappeared.

Leave the man his illusions till the Machine deemed him vital again.

First published in Galaxy’s Edge Magazine (March, 2015), edited by Mike Resnick

My first view of Alawea is bittersweet, as always. The beauty is breath-taking, from thin, blue rivulets that stream down the mountain, to the city itself, which leans back against the mountain’s rocky base as a ruler might lean into the high back of a throne. Spires rise as thin and fragile as a glass blower’s straw above the sweep and curve of villas that cascade down the terraced levels. Alawea, the city of my birth and wellspring of my nightmares.

I don’t return willingly but, like my parents, I am bi-gender and also a messenger. I go where I am sent. Though for many seasons I have lived in Zasna, serving the tetrarch of that city, if she bids me deliver a message to Alawea, then come I must.

The lowest level of the city is hidden behind the perimeter wall, and so it’s the elegant middle and opulent upper terraces that expand and define as I approach. Closer still and the wall looms largest. It blocks all else until I reach the city gate, where metal bars sketch thick black lines through my view of the jumbled shacks and mud-caked cobbles beyond.