XVI.

On the X Axis;

1866-1914

The Austrian treasure lay exactly where Fial had predicted it to be. He took a small silver coin from the hoard.

“Fian, I’ll flip you for who goes back to that last town.”

“What for?” Fiala asked.

“We need pens, ink, and paper. To list the coins. Dates, values, mint marks, wear, like that. It’ll be years before we can replace any of them. Memory won’t do. And it’ll have to be right, else it might change something.”

“What about economic changes? Won’t putting that money in circulation make changes? You didn’t think about that, did you?”

Neither man had. Fian responded, “We have to take the chance. We need the capital. I can’t see how a few thousand florins would affect history much anyway.”

Fiala pursed her lips. They were compromising their resolve already. They would be able to rationalize their deviations any time convenience demanded it.

It was pretty much what she had expected. Anyone who attained any standing in the State machinery learned the trick early.

Fian lost the toss.

“Well, take a fistful,” Fiala said. “I’m starved. And I could use some decent clothes. This thing must’ve been made out of a potato sack.”

“She has a point, Fial. We’ll end up in prison if we go flashing a fortune looking like this.” He took a handful of small silver, studied the coins.

“Don’t spend it all in one place. The more you scatter it, the less attention it’ll draw.”

“I know. Can you remember these till I get back? To check me?”

“I’ll have to, won’t I?”

“What’s your size, Fiala?”

“Think about that, Fian,” said Fial. “This is eighteen sixty-six. You don’t buy things off the rack here. You make your own. Unless you can afford a tailor. Just say yea by so. That’ll be good enough till we get out of the country and find a tailor.”

“I suppose you’re right again. I’m beginning to think you burying your nose in books all the time wasn’t such a waste of time after all.”

Thus, by degrees, they upgraded their apparel and story as they stole westward across Europe.

Neither Fian nor Fiala could get over how little real control governments maintained over their citizens. Contemporary social organization, from their viewpoint, was only slightly more structured than anarchy.

And the amazing thing was that the political movements of the time, even those antecedent to their own, all seemed to espouse more democracy and anarchy.

“That Bakunin is a madman,” Fian said of one of the State’s minor saints. “He wants to destroy everything. Something must have been lost in the translation.”

Fial just chuckled. “Maybe it is a good thing we decided not to look any of them up. But hang on, brother. It’ll get worse.”

• • •

It was in Paris that they encountered and charmed the Americans. The people were even more naive and generous than their fool descendants.

The Atlantic storms were terrible during a December crossing. Their ship was a day late making New York.

“Damn, I wish they’d hurry,” Fian growled from his place at the promenade rail. “I’m supposed to meet Handy today.”

“Use the English, father,” Fiala admonished remotely. She was captivated by the huge, rude new land rearing behind the piers, so different from the New York she had seen in her own time.

“Too slow, the strange tongue,” said Fial. He still fought mal de mer. A nineteenth-century steamer was a far cry from a twenty-first-century SST.

Fiala regressed to German herself. “Look at them. Swarming like rats.” Hundreds of men crowded the piers. Less than half appeared to be stevedores, or otherwise employed.

“Unemployment problem,” Fial observed. “The country hasn’t successfully changed over to a peacetime economy yet. Plus immigrants. Looks like we’ll be able to go ashore in a few minutes.”

Fiala rushed to be first.

Minutes later, “Top o’ the morning to you, young miss.”

Fiala turned.

The redhead, about twenty-five, cut her out of the mob with consummate skill, and established some proprietary right immediately acknowledged by his competitors.

“And won’t you be needing someone to manage the plunder?”

She frowned in perplexity.

“Ah, me manners. O’Driscol. Patrick Michael himself.... Ah, it’s not me manners. Ya sweet thing, ya don’t speak the language.”

“I do. But do you?”

“Ah, she’s got the tongue, don’t she, Patrick Michael? Aye, it’s the Queen’s Own Anglish I’m talking. Her Majesty just hain’t the proper use of it yet.”

And thus O’Driscol drifted into their lives, initially as a porter helping with their baggage, and later as a guide. And later still, as a bodyguard when, quite unaware of what he had saved, he drove off three would-be robbers while Fian was carrying twenty thousand dollars.

One morning, a year later, they went to see Fial off to his new home in Rochester.

As the train pulled out, Fian asked, “Patrick, what’s haunting you?”

The Irishman was forever looking over his shoulder and starting at the passage of unknown people. Hitherto, though, he had been completely uninformative about his past, except to proclaim that he came of the Kerry O’Driscols and not the Kilkenny, which made all the difference.

Patrick glared. Then grinned. “I’m an Irishman, ain’t I?”

“That might be explanation enough to another Irishman. Maybe even to an Englishman. But we lesser races...”

“Ah, the Anglish. They’d know, yes, but they’d never understand. A stubborn, thick-headed race.”

“So. Maybe you left home after some ill-starred attempt to educate them?”

“You know the Fenians, then?”

“No. But I understand the cantankerous nature of the human beast. You really think the Queen’s men would chase you this far?”

“No. But there’s them here what would be pleased to lay hands on the genuine Kerry O’Driscol. Them as put down the draft laws during the recent brouhaha with the South. And there’s them from Washington City worried about what the Fenians might be planning for Canada, and them on the other side o’ the law what feels O’Driscol owes them.”

With those points as arguments, and Patrick’s growing interest in Fiala to tilt the balance, Fian did not have a great deal of difficulty convincing O’Driscol that he should join their move west. The Irishman had lost virtually all taste for the life of a political activist.

It was a romantic era. With no State to demand her total devotion, Fiala enjoyed a postponed adolescence. Her life became a masquerade, she a tourist enjoying a foreign time. Even Fian succumbed, somewhat, to the Mardi Gras spirit.

Without duties or obligations, the soul was at liberty to chase butterflies of personal happiness.

Diversion was a necessity. Two centuries could make a long, boring walk home.

That making it was possible was beyond doubt. Fiala didn’t abandon herself completely. She researched contemporary medicine with the same intensity given play. And she quickly developed substitute rejuvenation courses that would see them into a more medically enlightened age, where the real thing could be obtained.

Fial’s job was to twist the tail of the tiger of capitalism till it yielded up enough danegeld to finance Fian in the creation of a primitive tachyon communicator. Fian was driven by a need to warn his future, or past, of Neulist’s imbecilic actions.

“What I’m trying to do,” he once told Fiala—she had just rendered a professional opinion, warning him that he had begun showing obsessive-compulsive tendencies—illustrating with a piece of string in which he had tied a loop, “is use the machine to snip out this backward loop, so, and have a straight line again.”

“Too many paradoxes for me.”

“Such as?”

“If you were going to be successful, we would’ve gotten the message already. We wouldn’t be here now.”

“Not necessarily. There’s still a knot in the string. Anyway, without computers, all I have to go on is intuition. My feeling is that there’s an oscillation. A duplication. Where it happens both ways. And going either way makes the other happen.”

“Isaac Newton?”

“Or thermodynamics.”

But Fian erred in his topological analogy, though he was on the right track. The string and loop were too linear. He should have been thinking of a Klein bottle, where the loop could go any of a thousand directions, inside and out, and still come back to the same starting point.

• • •

“It’s... elegant,” Fiala decided. They were viewing the St. Louis house for the first time. “Period. Definitely period.” She descended from the carriage. Patrick helped, then ran to open the gate. She had captivated the Irishman completely.

Fian followed with an amused smile. For Patrick’s peace of mind he pretended ignorance of what was going on.

“It’s remote enough.” The nearest house was a quarter mile away, on the Shaw estate. “Come on, Father! Let’s see what it looks like inside.”

“I’m glad you’re making the best of this. I never gave you much happiness before the accident.”

“You were all right. For our times. Anyway, it’ll all get tiresome. It’s a long time to wait.”

“Have a good time while you can, then.”

Fian’s obsessive work on his communicator persisted for a full two decades. He was compelled, to all practical purposes, to create his own technology, and that was a challenge worthy of an Einstein. Patrick made an invaluable, if ignorant, assistant.

Fial, from Rochester, made it all possible.

Patrick’s eventual disappearance finally murdered the little joy left in the working vacation.

There was nothing mysterious about it. He had found a woman interested in marrying and raising children. He hadn’t the nerve to explain in person, so just left a note.

“And I taught him to read and write!” Fiala spat.

“He was a good Catholic man,” her father replied. “His conscience got to bothering him. It had to happen someday. Be glad you got as much as you did.”

Fiala would not be consoled. She had loved O’Driscol in the silly, romantic style of the time, and insisted that she was desolate. In a month, though, the hard-headed twenty-first-century doctor returned and the decades with Patrick slipped into perspective. An amusing, diverting episode along the long road home. Nothing more.

The absence of the Irishman’s perpetual optimism made itself felt in Fian’s work immediately. Fian had never realized just how much donkey work there was. But he kept plugging for another two years.

“That’s it!” he shouted disgustedly one morning. “There’s no way to build the thing using tubes. I can’t create a pure enough vacuum. It’ll be another seventy years before I can go solid state. Fiala, I’m going home.”

“Where?”

“Back to Prague. Just for a year or two. It’s time those coins were replaced anyway. Fial can spare the money now.”

The new land held no more excitement for Fiala, either. “I’ll start packing. Are we going to sell the house?”

“No. I want you to stay. You’ll be safe. Neulist could be prowling Europe like some vengeance-mad Wandering Jew. Damn. Wouldn’t it have saved a lot of trouble if that bomb had killed him?”

The argument ran for days, but Fiala finally had to accept her fate, to remain behind.

Thus did the lonely years begin.

For one reason or another—his excuses always sounded good—Fian never got around to coming back. Eventually, Fiala resigned herself. He never would.

There was the occasional lover, when she encountered a man who, like Patrick, couldn’t sense the difference about her. She tried making friends with the new people building nearby, but few of them were immune to her alienness.

The loneliness became unspeakable for one raised in the crowded communal life of the densely populated State. It was broken only by occasional letters from Fial or her father. And those, ultimately, only depressed her more, for their loneliness leaked through their cheerful words.

The past was indeed a foreign land.

Maybe the Christians were on the right track. There was a hell. And this was it.

Over the first twenty-seven years—as long a time as she had lived in her own era—Fiala gradually forgot the thing in the back of her mind. Fian and Fial had annihilated their predecessors in the flesh within hours of reaching the new age, and she assumed hers had perished as well, though more slowly and quietly.

She was to be unpleasantly surprised.

The first attack came the evening of April 12, 1893, as she was about to retire.

She barely survived.

The thing had lain back all those years, studying, learning, abiding the opportune moment.

After four attacks spanning the next three years, Fiala finally determined the pattern. The assaults came only when she was tired and deeply depressed.

The Other wasn’t stupid. It wouldn’t attack when she wasn’t vulnerable....

So many years to wait and battle for existence.

And Fian just wouldn’t come to help.

The woman who had been her body’s mother had died. Those who remembered Fian as a peasant had all passed away. Shortly after the turn of the century, he re-established himself at Lidice. He hoped, he explained in his letters, to have more luck contacting the Agency from that site.

He even intended pursuing the obvious in crosstime communications by burying a warning note with the Austrian treasure.

Fial visited occasionally during the decades straddling the century’s turn, and Fiala made several journeys to Rochester. These vacations did little but make the loneliness worse after separation. By 1914 they had restricted communication to the occasional letter.

Populations were exploding near both homes. The St. Louis neighborhood, especially, was in the grip of a building boom. It seemed wise to retreat from public view lest too many questions be asked about their apparent agelessness.

Fiala invested that summer in concealing Fian’s machine with a wall and beneath a new basement floor. For several months that kept her too busy and too tired to be lonely.

An attack, a week following Fial’s final visit, came closer than ever to destroying her. Her haunt did seize control for a few minutes, driving her body into the street, where she shrieked for help in Bohemian German. Her Irish neighbors decided she was insane, but took no action.

The thing, fortunately, had no strategy for maintaining control. Fiala fought her way back.

Now it was she who lived in terror. The next episode, or the one following, might be her last. She was certain she could not destroy her unwanted companion. The thing had made itself invulnerable. She was much less confident of the reverse. Each assault educated the Other a little more, highlighting her weaknesses. She feared that, if it successfully supplanted her, she would suffer the fate of the spirits that once had occupied the bodies now inhabited by Fian and Fial.

Once the Other had been an ignorant peasant girl with severely restricted horizons. Barbarically ignorant. But it was smart, savagely crafty, and making full use of its advantages.

It had complete access to Fiala’s memories, thoughts, and emotions—while revealing none of its own. It knew what Fiala knew, could do what Fiala could do. Fiala, on the other hand, had gotten almost nothing from it since leaving Bohemia.

One thing she did know. The need to break out, to reassert control, to extract a revenge, had driven her mind-companion completely mad.

It was like living in the same head with a Colonel Neulist.

And someday, if she didn’t make it home first, the Other would win the one victory it needed to reach its goals.