Sea of Tranquility(36)

Ephrem swiped again, and I saw another photograph, an old man playing a violin in an airship terminal, his eyes closed. “This is Alan Sami,” Ephrem said. “He played the violin for several years in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal, circa 2200, and we believe it’s his music that Olive Llewellyn references in Marienbad. You’ll interview him and find out more about the music. Really just find out anything you can.” He moved on through the time line, and there was Olive Llewellyn, my mother’s favorite author, long-ago resident of Talia Anderson’s childhood home. “And here’s Olive Llewellyn. I regret to report that absolutely no one keeps surveillance footage for two hundred years, so there’s no record of whatever Olive Llewellyn may or may not have experienced there prior to writing Marienbad. You’ll interview her on her last book tour.”

“When was her last book tour?” I asked.

“November 2203. Early days of the SARS Twelve pandemic. Don’t worry, you won’t get sick.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“It was one of our childhood immunizations,” Ephrem said.

“Will there be other investigators assigned to the case?”

“Several. They’ll look at different angles, interview different people, or interview the same people in a different way. You may meet some of them, but if they’re good at their jobs, you’ll never know who they are. From your perspective, Gaspery, this is not a complicated assignment. You’ll conduct a few interviews, and then hand off your findings to a more senior investigator, who will take over and make the final determination, and if all goes well, there will be other investigations for you. You could have an interesting career here.” He was gazing at the time line. “Where I think you’ll start,” he said, “is by interviewing the violinist.”

“Okay,” I said. “When do I talk to him?”

“In about five years,” Ephrem said. “You have some training to do first.”





9


The training wasn’t like immersing myself in a different world. It was like immersing myself in successive different worlds, these moments that had arisen one after another after another, worlds fading out so gradually that their loss was apparent only in retrospect. Years of private instruction in small rooms in the Institute, years of passing by people who may or may not have been my fellow students in the halls—no one wore name tags here—and years of studying quietly in the Time Institute library, or in my apartment late at night with my cat asleep on my lap. Five years after I left the hotel, I reported for the first time to the travel chamber.

It was a midsize room made entirely of some kind of composite stone. At one end was a bench, molded into a deep indentation in the wall. The bench faced an extremely ordinary-looking desk. Zoey was waiting there, with a device that looked unnervingly like a gun.

“I’m going to shoot a tracker into your arm,” she said.

“Good morning, Zoey. I’m fine, thanks for asking. Nice to see you too.”

“It’s a microcomputer. It interacts with your device, which interacts with the machine.”

“Okay,” I said, giving up on pleasantries. “So the tracker sends information to my device?”

“Remember that time I gave you a cat?” she said.

“Of course. Marvin. He’s napping at home as we speak.”

“We sent an agent back to another century,” Zoey said, “but the agent fell in love with someone and didn’t want to come home, so she removed her own tracker, fed it to a cat, and then when we tried to forcibly return her to the present, the cat appeared in the travel chamber instead of her.”

“Wait,” I said, “my cat’s from another century?”

“Your cat’s from 1985,” she said.

“What,” I said, at a loss for words.

She took my hand—when was the last time we’d touched one another?—and I observed her grim concentration as she shot a silver pellet into my left arm. It hurt much more than I would’ve imagined. She opened a projection over the desk, and turned her attention to the floating screen.

“You should have told me,” I said. “You should have told me my cat was a time traveler.”

“Honestly, Gaspery, what difference would it make. A cat’s a cat.”

“You never were an animal person, were you.”

Her mouth was set in a thin line. She wouldn’t look at me.

“You should be happy for me,” I said, while she was adjusting something in her projection. “This is the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do, and I’m doing it.”

“Oh, Gaspery,” she said absently. “My poor little lamb. Device?”

“Here.”

She took my device, held it close to the projection, and handed it back to me.

“Okay,” she said. “Your first destination has been programmed. Go sit in the machine.”





10


A transcript:


Gaspery Roberts: Okay, it’s on. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.

Alan Sami: You’re welcome. Thank you for lunch.

GR: Now, just for the benefit of my recording, you’re a violinist.

AS: I am. I play in the airship terminal.