The Time Traveler's Almanac

AS TIME GOES BY

Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee is a highly respected English writer of science fiction, horror, and fantasy, with over seventy novels and hundreds of short stories to her credit. She has been a regular contributor over many years to Weird Tales magazine. She has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Nebula Award multiple times. This story was first published in Chrysalis 10 in 1983.

We had half a crew in here two twenties ago, swore they passed the Napoleon, coming up into the Parameter. But you know what spacers are, particularly when they’re in a Static Zone. Two-thousand-plus time streams colliding in space, and a white ironex wheel, fragile as a leaf, spinning round at the center of it all. You’re bound to get time-ghosts, and superstitions of all sorts.

The wheel here at Tempi was the first way station ever created, in the first Parameter they ever hit when they finally figured how Time operates out in deep space. You’ll know most, if not all of it, of course. How every star system functions in a different time sphere, everything out of kilter with everything else, and that the universe is composed of a million strands of time, of which only two thousand have as yet been definitely charted and made navigable. And you know too that Tempi, and her sister Zones – what they jokingly call the white holes in space – are the safe houses where time is, forever and always, itself at a stop. And that, though wheelers reckon in twenty-hour units, and though, like anywhere else, we have a jargon of past, present and future – yestertwenty, today, tomorrow – temporal stasis actually obtains all around a wheel. We move all right, but over the face of a frozen clock, over the face of a clock without any hands at all. Which means that whatever ship blows in, out of whichever of those two-thousand-odd time continuums, can realign here, or in another of the white holes, docked against a white ironex wheel, having come back, as it were, to square one. It’s here they wipe the slate clean before flying out again into chaos. A tract of firm ground in the boiling seas. In scientific terms: a Parameter, one constant sphere in a differential Infinity. In common parlance, just another way of keeping sane.

But sanity, like time, is relative. As I say, Tempi has its share of “ghosts”; like the Lyran wildflowers that are sometimes supposed to manifest on the Sixth Level. Not that I ever saw those. I did see the Napoleon, once.

It was back in the twenties when they still had that bar here on the Third Level–Rouelle Etoile, Star Alley. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It owed quite a lot to early-twentieth-century celluloid, you know those old movies, like thin acidulous slices of lemon. The Rouelle had that square-shouldered furniture, and the glass chunk ashtrays. The walls had rose and black satin poured down them. And some of the women would get out of their coveralls, and come into the Rouelle with satin poured down them too, and those long, dark scarlet nails and those long earrings like chandeliers. There was also a chandelier in the roof. You should have seen it. Like ice on fire. And under the chandelier there was a real piano, and a real pianist, a Sirtian, blue as coal, with the face of a prince, and hands like sea waves. The sounds that came out of the piano were the shape and color of the blades of light snowing off the chandelier. You should have seen that chandelier.

But I was telling you about the time I saw the Napoleon.

I was up on the Fourth Walk, one level over the Rouelle Etoile, where you can watch the ship explode in out of nothing, leaving the Warp Lanes at zero 50. Space was blind-clear as a pool of ink, without stars obviously, since you never see stars inside a Parameter. Incoming traffic was listed as over for that twenty. When I saw this great bottlenose dolphin surging up out of nowhere, I started to run for the Alert panel. Then something made me look back when I was two thirds along the gantry. And the ship just wasn’t there anymore.

I’m not given to hallucinations, and besides, I have a pretty good Recall. I remember sitting down on the gantry, and putting that ship together again on the blackboard of my mind, and taking a hard long look at her. And I realized, inside a second, she couldn’t be any crate left on the listings. The numerals and date-codings, you see, were Cycles out – about nineteen years or more, by Confederation reckoning. With the time-tangle out here, every code gets changed once every Cycle. Naturally, there’s the occasional tin can comes careening out of Warp, with its dating markers legally a few points overdue. But they’re little ships, freelance dippers nobody makes much fuss over. This was a big ship, a cool, pale giant. She had the old-fashioned diesel-pod at her stern too, burning like a ruby. But there was something else. My Recall was showing me enough to know her markings weren’t just out of date, they were wrong. And she had a device. Anyone who’s ever heard of the Trade War knows about the pirate ships, and the blazons they used to carry. Quite a few people know what the device of the Napoleon was: an eagle over a sunburst. And that’s precisely what this ship had on her bow.

I didn’t report anything. Just hinted around, you know the kind of thing. Then I began to get comparison sightings, and there were quite a lot. To my knowledge, nobody’s ever come face to face with Day Curtis himself. Except, there is one story.

Curtis had a reputation all his own, something of a legend going for him, even before Napoleon disappeared with almost all hands. The Trade War had broken the Confederation in three neat pieces, and there were plenty of captains running through the guns on all three sides, taking cargo to wherever it was meant, or not meant, to go, for a suitable fee, and not averse to accumulating extra merchandise if they came across it in the Warp Lanes. Curtis was unique in that he’d hire out to any side at any time, and simultaneously commit acts of piracy against the very side he was running for. The reason he still got paid was he could make Napoleon play games with the time streams and the Warp that are technically impossible, even today. If you could outbid everyone else and buy him, he’d get whatever it was that had to be got to wherever it was it had to go. No matter what was in the way: Sonic barriers, radiation strips, a flotilla of fully armed attack vessels. More than once he split a fleet in two, led one half away through the Warps, now visible and now not, eventually bringing them back by the hand straight into the cannon of the second half who were still waiting for him. He would slip between like a coin through a slot, while they, reacting to pre-primed targets, inadvertently blasted hell out of each other. But you’ll have heard the stories about Curtis and his ship, everyone has.

Tempi Parameter was a truce zone then, because it had to be. There were only two wheels spinning in those days, and everybody needed them, whichever part of the Confederation owned you. There was every kind of craft passing in and out: patrol runners, battle cruisers, destroyers, merchantmen, smugglers and privateers. And the crews knew better than not to keep quiet when they met each other in the corridors, the diners and the bars. With ships diving in and out of time like fish through water, and only a couple of safe places to go between, you bowed to the rule and you left your gun at the entry port. Some of the most notorious desperadoes that ever took to space came through here, time and time again, on their way to and from mayhem. But even in that kind of company, Day Curtis stood out.

A slight dark man, with the somber pallor most spacers get, a type of moon-tan, and those thick-fringed Roman-Byzantine eyes you find in frescoes on Earth. You may have seen news-video of him. There was some, the Cycle Napoleon towed that shelled liner, the Aurigos, through her enemy lines into harbor on Lyra – for the bounty, of course. Or the occasion the entire three segments of the split Confederation each put a price on his head, and most of his brother pirates went out to get him and never got him. He was even finer-made than he looks in those old videos, but the expression was the same. He never joked, he never even smiled. It wasn’t any act, anything he’d lost or become. Whatever it is that smooths the edges of human isolation, that was the item he’d come into life without. His crew treated him like a stone king. They knew he could run the show, and with something extra, a sort of cold genius, and they trusted him to do it. But they hated him in about the same measure as they respected him, which was plenty. He had a tongue like a razor blade. You got cut once, and that was enough. Since he was handsome, women liked him all right, until they learned they couldn’t get anywhere with him. The ones that kept trying were usually sorry. All that being the case, the story, this last story I ever heard about Day Curtis, is probably apocryphal. The man who told it to me didn’t claim it wasn’t.

I heard that last story two years after I saw the Napoleon from the Fourth Walk. I heard it on the twenty that they closed up the Rouelle Etoile. It was the ninth Cycle, and the day after the tempest smashed those fifteen ships to tinder between Sirtis and the Dagon Strip. I can remember it very well, even without Recall. The bar despoiled, naked and hollow, seeming to echo, the way a dying venue does, with all the voices, the music, the colors that have ever existed in it. A team of men were portioning up that huge glissade of a chandelier, lifting it on to dollies, and carrying it away. The piano was long gone, but there were the dim sheer notes of a girl quietly sobbing to herself, somewhere nearby. I never knew the reason; someone on one of those ships, maybe, had belonged to her … The man and I were finishing the last flask of Noira brandy, at the counter in the midst of the suspiring desolation. And we grew warm and sad, and he told me the story.

And outside the oval ports, innocent and terrible, the field of space and timelessness hung on the rim of the vignette, a starless winter night.

* * *

The Rouelle Etoile was almost deserted, that twenty. There was some big action out at zero 98, and the ships had lifted off like vultures, to join in or to scavenge. The tall marble clock against the wall said nineteen fifteen, but the blue pianist was still rolling the tide of his hands up and down the keys. About four or five customers were sitting around chewing trouble, or playing Shot over on the indigo baize. And in one of the corner booths was Day Curtis. Napoleon was in dock, had come in two twenties before with a hole in her flank, and the crew were going all out to patch her over well enough to take her out into 98 and see what was left worth mopping up. But it didn’t look as if the repairs were going to make it in time, and at eighteen hundred Curtis had walked into the Rouelle with a look like dead lightning in the backs of his eyes. Curtis seldom showed when he was angry, but he could drink like dry sand, and that’s what he was doing, steadily and coldly draining the soul out of the bar, when the woman came in.

She looked late twenties, with hair black as the blackest thing you ever saw, which might be space, or an afterimage of some sun, cropped short across the crown, but growing out into one long free-slung black comma across her neck and shoulders. She had the spacer’s tawny paleness otherwise, and one of the poured dresses that went with the Rouelle, almost the same color as she was. She was off one of the ships that had stayed in dock, an artisan’s shuttle that had no quarrel with anyone in particular, but she walked in as if she’d come on a dare, ready to fight, or to run. She went straight to the bar counter and ordered one of the specialty cocktails, which she drank straight down, not looking at anyone or anything. Then she ordered another, and holding it poised in the long stems of her fingers, she turned and confronted the room. She moved like a dancer, and she had the unique magic which comes with a beauty that surpasses its name, a glamour that doesn’t fit in any niche or under any label. Four or five of the men in the bar were staring at her, but her gaze passed on over them with a raking indifference. She was obviously searching for something and, the impression was, hoping not to find it. Then her eyes reached the corner booth, and Curtis.

It’s possible he may have noticed her when she came in, or he may not. But implacable scrutiny, even in a truce zone, is frequently the prologue to trouble. After a second or so, he lifted his head slowly, and looked back at her. Her face didn’t change, but the glass dropped through her fingers and smashed on the polished floor.

For about a quarter of a minute she kept still, but there was a sort of electricity playing all around her, the invisible kind a wire exudes when there’s a storm working up in the stratosphere. Then, she kicked the broken glass lightly out of her way, and she walked very fast and direct, over to Curtis’ table. He’d kept on watching her, they all had, even the Sirtian pianist, though his hands never missed the up and down flow of the piano keys. The woman had the appearance of being capable of anything, up to and including the slinging of a fine-honed stiletto right across the bar into Curtis’ throat. Only a blind man would have ignored her. Maybe not even a blind man.

When she reached the table, the slim hand that had let go the glass flared out like a cobra and slashed Curtis across the face.

“Well,” she said, “you win the bet. What am I supposed to pay you?”

He’d had these one-sided scenes with women before, and supposedly assumed this was only another, one more girl he had forgotten. He said to her, matter-of-factly, “I’m sure you can find your own way out of here.”

“Yes,” she said, “I remember now. You warned me. Last time.”

“I probably warned you you were a fool, too. Either get out of the bar, or I will.”

“Fifteen years is a long time,” she said. Her eyes were like scorched freckled topaz, and there were white flowers enameled on her crimson nails. “I presume I’ve changed. Even if you haven’t. Oh, but I don’t expect you to recollect me. How could you? I just wanted to see, to understand—”

Curtis got up. He was moving by her when she caught at his arms. Her face was stark with the genuine terror the anger had been all along, and she said flatly, “Suddenly I’ve worked it out. I do understand. I’ve been afraid for years, and now I know why. You’re dead, Curtis. Or you will be. Tomorrow – soon—”

She’d started to retreat from him even while she said it, in a dazed, bewildered glide, but of course now he reached out and caught her back. A threat was a threat, and even a woman off an artisan’s vessel could be in Confederation pay.

“All right,” he said, holding her pinned. I’m interested. Tell me more about my death.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Please let go.”

“I let go when I hear what you have to say. Perhaps.”

“I don’t, after all, have anything to say.”

“What a shame. Let me prompt you. You’re dead, Curtis. Or you will be.”

“We all could be,” she said with an attempt at somber lightness. ‘There’s a war going on out there.”

“There’s a war going on in here,” he said. “You just started it.”

“You’re hurting me.”

“Not yet.”

She went on looking at him and he went on holding her. The room was full of piano currents and utter listening silence.

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “Let me sit down, and I’ll tell you.”

He nodded, and she slid into the booth, but he kept a grip on her wrist. They sat facing each other, almost holding hands, almost like lovers, ignoring the rest of the room, and he said to her gently, “In case you forget this is a truce zone, you’d better bear it in mind I can break your wrist in two seconds flat.”

She smiled dismally.

“I believe you would.”

“What’s more important, I believe it.”

She looked at the tabletop between them.

‘This is going to be difficult.”

“Only for you.”

She said bitterly, “You know, you’re almost funny.”

“The word ‘funeral’,” he said, “also begins with the word ‘fun’. Think about it.”

“All right.” Her eyelids tensed like two pale golden wings pasted across her eyes. Then her face smoothed out, relaxed, lost every trace of character. She might have been a doll, and her voice might have been a tape. ‘When I was sixteen, around half my lifetime ago, I was here in Tempi. I was traveling in my grandfather’s ship, the Hawk, before the war really hotted up. We’d come from Sirtis and we were heading for Syracuse. The ship was just a little cargo runner, completely legitimate and authorized up to the hilt. He wasn’t expecting any trouble – the cargo was safe and dull – and he’d brought me along to get me out of military school for a few months. I was so glad to be away, glad to be playing female and adult, and not just guns. He brought me in here, and gave me my first sunburst in a tall narrow glass. About seventeen hundred all the Alert panels started going off. An unscheduled lifeboat had blown into the Parameter. The markings were scalded off, and when they got the casings open, there was only one man in it. There was quite a squall then, because the name of the vessel he claimed to have come from wasn’t down on any of the listings. Besides, he was talking about a tempest out on zero 98, a time gale that cost him his ship, and there was no gale registering anywhere. Even so, he kept insisting there must be other survivors to be pulled in, but no one came, and when they used the sonar to scan, they picked up nothing, just as they weren’t picking up the gale. They questioned the man from the lifeboat until about nineteen hundred, and then they let him come into the Rouelle Etoile, with an official escort. He went over to the bar counter, and then he turned and looked right round the room. There was quite a crowd. My granddaddy was playing Shot over on the baize, and I was sitting exactly where you are now, in my grown-up frock, with one of the young helmsmen off the Hawk. The man who’d come in out of space looked at everyone until he got to me. Then he walked across. He dragged me to my feet and held me by my shoulders, and he swore at me. Jove, my helmsman, landed out at him, and the stranger thunked poor Jove across the head. Granddaddy came running with the official escort, and there was something of a fight. When somebody finally laid the stranger out with one of those chunk ashtrays from the bar, I took stock of my feelings. I was scared, horrified, and very flattered. It was all crazy. But I looked at the crazy stranger on the floor, with blood running through his hair, and he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, and, for whatever reason, I was the one he’d singled out. Quite logically, though I didn’t know it at the time, I fell in love with him. And it was you, Day Curtis.” She raised her eyes again, and gazed at him again. “You. Exactly as you are now. And I was sixteen.”

There was a pause. Curtis appeared bored, and simultaneously very dangerous. When she didn’t continue, he said, “If I let you go on, I imagine you’ll eventually reveal why you’re giving me this time cliché myth.”

“The nature of time,” she said, as coldly as he. “What do we really know about it? Two thousand streams, and us playing about in them like salmon.”

“The kind of time paradox you’re doling out is the sort of junk a Parameter is there to invalidate. Assuming it could even happen. You should change your brand of dream pills.”

“All right, mister,” she said. “Do I go on, or do I get out?”

He sat and studied her. He said, “You can tell it to the end.”

“Thank you,” she said icily.

“It’ll be interesting, seeing you hit the rotten wood and fall right through it.”

“Damn you,” she said.

“It takes more than you to do that.”

She stared at the tabletop again. She said, “They put you – it was you, Curtis – in the Medical Center on the Second Level. Guess what I did?” She glanced at him, and away. “I was sixteen, and I was in love. I went to your room. You were sitting staring out of the port at that blind-black Parameter sky, and your eyes looked just as black … though they’re not black at all, are they? Never mind. You said, ‘What the hell do you want?’ Wasn’t that a tender greeting? I didn’t know what to do, whether to fight you or surrender, or go away, or stay. I stayed. I stayed, Curtis. And gradually you started to tell me. About the time storm, about the number of the Cycle – fifteen years on from where it really was. You told me how I’d be when I was thirty-one, and how I’d walk into the Rouelle in the last hours of this twenty, and I’d see you, and drop my glass on the floor … I had to come in here tonight, to act it out. I didn’t think you’d be here. No. I did think you would. But if you were, it had to be some joke. You’d be in your forties. You’d laugh at me. But you’re not in your forties, and, my God, you’re not laughing. You’re just the way you told me, warned me, you’d be, that night I was sixteen and you told me not to come to Tempi ever again. But I had to. You can see that. Anyway, my ship came through Tempi, I didn’t have any choice this time. I could hardly have avoided it.”

She stopped, and detached one of the long white cigarettes from the dispenser. She drew on it and the ignition crystal broke, and the end glowed a pale, dull rose. The smoke made a design round her words as she said, “Tomorrow you take your ship out and you meet the storm. Your ship dies out there in the Warp Lanes. So do you. It’s just some part of you that’s left wandering there, lost, unaligned. And somehow, I draw you back, to the wrong Cycle, the wrong time, back to that night I was sixteen and I sat here in the Rouelle Etoile. I said, some part of you. Much more than that. You. It had to be because—” She faltered remotely, as if reading from a board abruptly obscured. Then: “I made you come back out of nowhere, and you hated me for it. It was the first intense emotion you’d ever felt for any human being. I think you wanted to kill me more than anything. And I think I’d have let you kill me. My own first really intense emotion, too.”

“So,” he said, “you got laid to the sound of discordant violins.”

She smiled tightly. “You should know. Unfortunately, you can’t. It’s my past, your future.”

“There are two alternatives,” he said. “Either you’re insane, or someone paid you to spook me about the next flight I take. Which is it?”

“No one paid me.”

“Which means you were paid. I hope you kept the money. You may need it for medical expenses.”

“Even if you kill me tonight, which you don’t, I’d still be waiting for you, in my yesterday. Tomorrow you’ll come out of space, and I’ll be there.” She finished the cigarette, and let it die in the glass ashtray. “I don’t think,” she said, “you had any right to come back out of death and time and space and haunt me, and ruin my life. I don’t think you have any right to be here, in my future, and ruin it again. I shouldn’t have tried to find you. But how could I resist?”

Curtis was no longer touching her, just his eyes, fixed on her, long lids blinking now and then, that was all. The rest of the room hadn’t been able to hear their conversation once it was trapped inside the booth, a low, coldly impassioned murmur of two voices, but mostly her voice, saying what she claimed to be the truth to him, as if it were a poem, the monologue from some play. So the room cast a look at them now and then, but nothing else. The two Shot players had even finished up and left the bar. And the pianist kept the dark blue tides coming and going on the piano keys, and the chandelier snowed its lights.

“I don’t want you to die,” she said finally.

“I can make you deliriously happy then,” he said, “because I don’t intend to.”

“I wish,” she said, “I could show you the proof of what happened. If I could prove it to you – if I could convince you – But I was sixteen, and the proof got lost, snatched and swept away, like everything else.” She met his eyes again, for a long, long time, and then she said, “I don’t think you have a soul anyway. Not this Cycle. I gave you a soul. It grew inside you, like the hate you felt for me, unless it wasn’t hate at all. And in the end, it looked back at me out of your eyes. But your eyes tonight are like the flat disks of sunglasses.”

He said, “If it meant so much, why didn’t I stay with you?”

It was the first, and the only admission, that he accepted what she said – not as factual or possible, certainly neither of those – but as a fiction worthy of analysis. But he said it with an edge to his voice that could have skinned an apple.

She said softly, “You couldn’t or wouldn’t, or weren’t allowed to. Or maybe, if you were some extraordinary kind of ghost, the power to survive in time is limited. Like light-cells. Or an echo. Except—” She put her hands together as if examining some element caught between them. “Next twenty you were gone. They searched. The theory was you’d stolen one of the wheel’s own lifeboats. I suppose one might have been missing. My grandfather said none was. But that was the theory. The wreck you’d come in on had disintegrated under the tests they’d been subjecting it to. They’d been careful, and that surprised them, but it can happen. As I say, you’d vanished without trace. Almost. Almost.” She waited, long enough for seven or eight bars of piano melody to fill the gap between them. At last she said, “You’re not going to ask me what, if anything, you left behind. Are you?”

The piano shivered like silver leaves, and he was no longer watching her. Two tears, like silken streamers, unraveled from her eyes. They didn’t spoil either her looks or her makeup, and presently they dried and might never have been.

The glow dawned through the Rouelle’s marble clock that showed one twenty was folding over into another.

The woman got up. She walked to the bar counter and bought a triple Noira brandy, and took it to the piano, setting the black-gold glass where the Sirtian could reach it. He bowed to her, like the prince he was, and she leaned forward and said something in his ear. He let the waves roll on over the keys while he thought, searching back through the storerooms of his brain to look out what she’d asked for, then, not breaking the rhythm, he tipped the tides of the music over into it. It was one of those old songs the Rouelle Etoile was so adept at conjuring. One of the songs from the celluloid era of twentieth-century Earth. In those same years, in Sirtis, they’d been raising temples of cloudy fire, like blue winter suns. But on the screens of Earth, the black-and-white flickering women, in their high-shouldered dresses that clung to them like snakes, the thin, bruised-eyed men, burning smokily out like the cigarettes in their mouths, had danced and fought and wise-cracked and loved. And all the while the wild pure stars had been waiting, and the Nature of Time, and, two hundred years away another era, of looking back, full circle, amazed, into recognizable eyes and hearts and minds. Everything changes; people, never. No, they never do.

The woman leaned by the piano, listening to the Sirtian play the song, her head averted from the booth. When the song ended, she turned, and Curtis was gone.

About five hours later, her own ship pulled off from the wheel. Nothing happened to the ship, she got wherever she was going, and so did the woman who had sat in the bar with Curtis. Afterwards, no one knew her name. The artisan ship’s listing had ten female crew aboard, three female passengers. She could have been any one of those. She became a beautiful strange event, a story that got told around. Because nobody in the bar heard much of the conversation between her and Curtis, guesswork calcified round it, staled it, defused it, and, at length, changed it into just another anecdote, which probably isn’t true.

* * *

What happened with Day Curtis himself, of course, is known pretty precisely.

At one-oh-seven of the new twenty, he walked along the gantry to the bay where Napoleon lay in her repair webbing like a vast wounded whale. Despite earlier predictions, her crew had got her patched, welded, and in fair shape. Certainly she looked sound enough to take the trip out to 98. Sonic reports were still coming in on that one, and a couple of liners were reportedly adrift, split wide open, and treasure-trove swirling out of them as if from a cornucopia. Some of the little lazy ships were even sneaking out now into Warp; the lions and the jackals would be feeding together.

Curtis’ crew were eager to be part of the show, and they hadn’t anticipated he would be any different in his reaction. Then Curtis knocked the walkway from under them by canceling the drive order and grounding the ship.

He didn’t give any reason, but that wasn’t uncommon. Generally the reason for anything he did would have been self-explanatory. Not now, of course.

If you credit the story of the black-haired woman, obviously you can figure out what the reason may have been. Curtis didn’t credit her, but he did credit she was working on him, and for a larger stake than a fifteen-year-old love affair. Whoever was really behind the scene in the Rouelle had made particular deductions based on Curtis’ presumed psychological patterns. Warned off going back into Warp that twenty, Curtis would, contradictorily, throw himself and his ship into immediate action. Or so somebody might have supposed. And if that was what they had predicted and wanted him to do, there must be some excellent reason also for their desires. Perhaps some very special welcome had been rigged for him, out in the Warp. Or the ship herself might have received some extra-special attention … If the girl in the Rouelle had been meant to push him into some type of contrary and precipitate heroism, she had failed. Though not believing her warning, he could act as if he did. Intended to race Napoleon away into space, he could stay put, and watch for what new developments occurred. And for which individuals or which organization was revealed by them.

Curtis gave his grounding order, and walked back along the gantry.

He had a crew who respected him totally, and, in most cases, hated him in equal measure. Up until then, their wants and their ambitions had run concurrently with his own. Now they’d been slaving on the tall white hip of Napoleon, in a blaze of sweat, steam and laserburn, and he strolled over from the bar and tolled their hopes of loot and blood, the reward they always needed to have from him in lucre or kind, because he never offered it any other way.

Half an hour after Curtis walked off the gantry, Napoleon’s Second Officer, a man named Doyeneau, led a ten-minute mutiny. By two-thirty, Napoleon was free of the Parameter and scorching out toward zero 98.

At two thirty-five, a message was sent back to Curtis at Tempi. He’d made the one immortal mistake of his career, and the message showed it. They were angry enough, that crew of his, to steal his ship, but much too afraid of him to sue for pardon. They would never be back. He must have known he’d lost everything, and when the second message came in, the automatic tracker on sonic, it was only the second most terrible error that twenty.

An hour out into the Warp, a little storm came up. It was so small it could have passed like the blow of a child’s fist striking the hull. But Doyeneau, already in a kind of panic, panicked himself into an avoidance maneuver Curtis had contrived maybe a hundred times. Doyeneau dove the ship at the eye of the storm, to break the barriers and get through, but there was no eye in this storm, only a center of spurling matter. And when, caught up in that, Doyeneau gave his order to jump the stream, one continuum to another, Napoleon’s patched casing blew, and took out most of the side of the ship.

There is no sound in space, we all know that. No sound, no air, no stopping place. A long fall that never ends, the bottomless pit. Picture a great white fish, cloven in one curving side, shriveling away and away down those empty rivers, her diesel-pod fluttering like a scarlet ember, dying.

At least, that’s how it goes. No one was ever entirely sure, since no one ever got back from Napoleon. They pieced a few fragments together from sounds picked up, a whole Cycle after, on the delay playback of the sonar here at Tempi. Her death is surmise. Like a lot of things.

Curtis lit off somewhere, at some time. The scenario and the characterization grow vague from the moment that his ship vanished, as if he had lost his soul. The last salient fact is that, one seven-mooned night on Syracuse, in an alley near the space-dock, someone, who is supposed to have resembled Curtis closely, negotiated a deal to rim an unspecified cargo out beyond Andromeda, in a merchantman whose name has not survived. This may or may not have been Curtis, but the far stars are pretty far away. Legends burn out there, good and bad, and reputations dwindle. And there was never anything to stop him altering his name, beyond a touch of legal wrangling. Whatever caused it, you lose him, like an echo, somewhere out among the rumors and the cold green suns.

As for the story about the woman in the Rouelle Etoile, as I said before, it’s probably apocryphal. If it weren’t, that sort of time paradox is too absurd to handle. It would be crazy enough for a man to get free of an exploding ship, take off in a lifeboat, and then home in on a timeless zone – in the wrong time. And to arrive Cycles out of synchronization, because a girl had drawn him there simply by forewarning him that she would – for that, actually, is what her warning entails … Yes, all that’s crazy enough. But then to add this other crazier time paradox on top of it: He ducked. The one thing the time cliché can’t take, that was what he did. He avoided it. He wasn’t on the Napoleon when she perished. So how could he home in, a magnetized time-ghost, to this whirling ironex wheel, outside of which, in the cool pool of the Parameter, time stands irreparably static?

Clever of you to spot I’m heading somewhere. There is a sort of epilogue. Take it as you find it.

Remember, I said the story was told me on the twenty that they closed the Rouelle Etoile for keeps, the twenty after the tempest. The girl was softly crying her little lost piano notes in the background, the dead chandelier had been trundled away, and the brandy flask was almost dry. Remember too, I said no one here had ever come face to face with the ghost of Day Curtis, on the wheel at Tempi – except there is one story. It’s mine. I came face to face with that ghost, and all through that somber twenty, I sat in the Rouelle with him, drinking brandy. Listening to what he had to say. It truly was Curtis, at least to look at, the elegant build, the moon-tan skin, the dark hair, the Roman eyes. But he was about thirty-five years of age, and Curtis wasn’t his name. And he wasn’t a ghost.

You may have wondered how I knew, or how he knew to tell me, what their conversation was, the woman and Curtis, in the booth, which had been so low the rest of the room couldn’t hear it. But maybe she told someone. Found them and told them. Remember what she said to Curtis? About proof, and how it had been snatched away? Or perhaps my Curtis-who-wasn’t made it up. Perhaps he’d seen the old videos and a freak likeness to another man, and it took his fancy to pretend, and that’s all he was doing. Playing pirates. Sons of pirates.

But if you accept the story, only for a moment, she was sixteen, and very likely quite innocent. She could have had a child, although how, in anyone’s book, can a time-ghost convey biological life?

The place where the Rouelle used to be is a storage bay now. But sometimes, when you’re alone up there with black nothing crowding against the ports, you can hear the Sirtian’s piano still playing, far away. It’s the stutter of the sonar link-pipes in the walls, it has to be. There’s no time in a white hole, and no true past, and no true future, no matter what the future brings. As for lovers, they come and go, welcome or not. And as for time, outside the Confederation’s thirty-eight Parameters, and the thirty-six spinning ironex wheels, it’s there. It goes by.