Words only he could see scored his vision.
Welcome to Intelligent Core (I-Core™) BIOS v7.01
Water assaulted his face. There would be time to think over the failures that had led to the hot metal in his lung. Where in hell had that police officer come from? His overclocked nerves had passed notice of the bullet before it had met his flesh, but not soon enough for him to twist aside. A lucky shot. Or a good shot.
Warning: Brachiocephalic artery has lost integrity.
Warning: Systolic pressure critical.
Warning: Sinus rhythm and QRS complexes abnormal.
Warning: Lactic acidosis detected.
I-Core has begun the repair of Cory, R. 6457-1112-1111 and will remain in autonomous mode until the repair is complete. Nanochondrical base functions will not be affected. Stand by, please.
Cory’s fight to stay conscious brought back memories of swimming at his grandfather’s fishery, not far from Atlanta. He had visited the lake with his wife Catherine not two months after their wedding. At noon, they had dived down, holding hands, competing to reach the lake bed. It surprised neither of them that Cory, the soldier, had reached it first. He put a full palm to the gravel then he kicked himself upwards, twisting to see the naked silhouette of Catherine already halfway to the surface, having abandoned the attempt. Cory remembered rising towards her. The chilly strata were topped by warmer draughts; all the while a sleepy panic marked the time before he could take a life-saving breath.
Chapter Thirteen
August, 1947, Buenos Aires
As Cory crossed the city, he thought about the message he had found in the mausoleum. It had confirmed a rendezvous. His twenty-day wait was over. He could avoid the traffic-choked streets by taking el subte, the underground, but he wanted time to think, and the narrow, crowded pavements answered wonderfully in this regard. They forced him to drift, to slow. In truth, the underground held a certain anxiety for him. It was crowded and airless. The last time he had used the service, there had been a blind man moving through the cramped tranvía subterráneo selling shirt stiffeners. The passengers had jostled him, complaining in that Buenos Airean manner about their rights and the many things they had to talk about without interruption from this man. So Cory walked the streets and sometimes thought about the man, and his own father, just as he now thought about the message in the mausoleum. The streets were wet with the recent rain and smelled of tar and petrol.
He asked himself why Jennifer would take the risk of a rendezvous. There were surer methods of communication. She could send him a coded telegram or letter. The energy and risk of injecting a human through more than one hundred years of time were considerable.
However, he looked forward to the meeting. He had a growing sense that the people he met, even little Lisandro, were dancing to a tune that only he could hear. Cory, the vagabundeo, was wandering through a monument to the past perfect: past completed. These people had already lived and died. He convinced himself that these thoughts were intellectual musings in the style of a reductio ad absurdum. He would not voice them to Jennifer when he met her at the prearranged time. The notion sounded too much like Jackson, Cory’s predecessor, who had cracked under the strain of time travel. For Jackson, the zombies were too much. Not Cory. He would cope.
Cory reached the art deco apartment block ten minutes early. Following a reconnoitre, he waited outside a hotel. Some builders were observing the midday ritual of a street-side barbecue. Cory declined the offered meat and moved along to an intersection. Being an intersection, it was thronging with people. Two men argued about Peron and five-year plans; their discussion was punctuated by the sudden intuition and non sequitur of enthusiastic but inexpert debaters. Behind them, three ladies managing fans declared them stupid. A young woman in light, black petticoats offered Cory a flower from her stall, but he shook his head, smiling. Then he looked at his watch. It was time.
He approached the gated hallway of the apartments. Two elderly porteros porteños were sweeping the floor beyond the gate. They looked up at Cory but did not let him in. He pressed the buzzer for the second of the apartments. A minute passed. The taller of the porteños, who was looking at Cory, stopped sweeping and wiped his mouth with the edge of his neck cloth. When the gate unlocked itself, Cory stepped back. It was the first electric entry system he had seen in Buenos Aires. He passed through, whistling, and raised his hat to the sweepers. They frowned and moved into the shadows on either side of the hallway. Cory’s expensive shoes and cane reflected in the polished wooden floor.
He found Jennifer on a bench in the centre of the courtyard. There was a jacaranda tree between the bench and the white wall. Beneath the black branches and purple-blue corollas, Jennifer sat like an arachnid, shaded and still. Her outfit was black. She wore a wide-brimmed hat, a black top—anachronistically tight—with blooming cuffs. Her skirt was ankle-length. A veil darkened and blurred her face. It was, however, the bracelet on her right wrist that drew most of Cory’s attention. With that device Jennifer could conjure a wormhole on demand. It permitted her a direct connection with the future. This connection was denied to Cory, who had no rank for such a privilege. His communications were limited to cryptic announcements in the classified advertisements of newspapers; to be read, if at all, by automated agents that Jennifer had assured him would scour the archives.
As Cory approached the bench, he offered his hand. She ignored it.
‘I think–’ he began.
‘You’re the monkey,’ the woman replied, ‘and I’m the organ grinder. So stop thinking. Sit down and code in.’
Cory sat. The bench was wet from the recent rain.
It was 1st August, 1947. That meant he had to code in with a fragment of poetry.
Where is Echo, beheld of no man, only heard on river and mere? he thought.
The answer came as a second thought, not his: But where are the snows of yesteryear?
‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Do you understand the seriousness of what you did, Cory?’ she said. Only her lips moved. ‘The calculations require a precise mass. Precise. You almost destroyed the bridge. Dumb luck kept your atoms together.’
Cory shook his head. What the hell was she talking about? He had wanted to tell her that she was the first real person he had met in months. He had wanted conversation.
‘Never mind that it weighs next to nothing,’ she said, half to herself. ‘The further back you go, the more sensitive the insertion becomes to initial conditions. It took a whole bloody day to reset.’
‘You’ve gotten it wrong,’ Cory said, smiling crookedly. He still hoped the conversation could be salvaged. He needed, he supposed, her humanity. ‘I’m meant to act British, you’re meant to act American.’
‘Don’t question my patriotism,’ she said. ‘Hand it over.’
‘What?’
She snapped her fingers. ‘The ring.’
Cory stared at her until the moment grew long enough for her head to turn, cold and slow, towards him. Until those eyes were fully on his, he had not believed that she could be serious.
‘Can’t I keep it? The thing’s travelled with me already. It represents my promise.’
‘Sweetheart, don’t try to be profound. Not in that hat.’
He sighed and gave her the ring. She placed it in her small handbag and relaxed somewhat, letting her back curve against the slats of the bench. She took a long breath and looked at him as though this action—the handing over of the ring—represented a second beginning. She even smiled. Cory did not smile back.