Ralph looked around at the damned medieval street market. This time, before he could say anything, an attractive dark-haired woman grabbed his upper arm firmly, pulled him close to her, and spoke into his ear. “Keep your mouth shut, if you know what’s good for you,” she whispered urgently. She looked remarkably like the young woman he had seen before, but a bit older and a lot more intense.
She took him by the arm, and led him through the fair. Toothless old women in their forties offered her root vegetables, but she shook her head. Children tried to sell her sweetmeats, but the young woman pushed on. Without seeming to hurry, without drawing attention to herself or him, she quickly led Ralph to the edge of the fair. People who noticed them smiled knowingly, and some of the men gave him a wink. The woman led him behind a hayrick, a seductive look on her face.
Behind the huge mound of hay, the noise of the fair was diminished, and, for the moment at least, they were visible to no one. The woman’s flirtatious manner had vanished. She pushed Ralph away from her and glared at him. Ralph was a little afraid: didn’t people in medieval times hit one another a lot? This woman was mad.
“Ralph, you idiot!” she said in a low but exasperated voice. She’s not speaking Middle English, Ralph thought. Momentarily he wondered: was she a medieval scholar of modern English? Uh….
She looked at him sternly. “People here are smarter than you think! You have to take some precautions! You can’t just show up and expect everyone to ignore you.”
“What?” said Ralph, brilliantly.
“You dunderhead,” she said. “You’re lucky you weren’t burned at the stake. They were waiting for you, or someone like you. Any old time traveler would do.”
“What’s your name?” Ralph asked.
“I’m Sylvie, but that’s not important.”
“It’s important to me,” said Ralph.
She shook off his attention. “Come with me. Don’t say a word, don’t even open your mouth.”
“But how did you know?” said Ralph. “How do you know I’m a time traveler? Why do you speak a language I can understand?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Sylvie. “You were the first, but you’re not the only. Historians of time travel come here all the time, to see where you landed on that very first trip. The locals are getting restless. They flayed those travelers they identified, or they burned them, or they pressed them to death with stones. We couldn’t let that happen to you, especially before you told us how it worked.”
“How on earth would these yokels have ever noticed me?” he asked.
“Your damn teeth,” she said. “Your flawless, glow-in-the-dark, impossibly white teeth.” She handed him a rather ugly set of yellowish fake teeth. “Put these on now.” Ralph did.
Sylvie then gestured toward a nearby hovel. “Over there,” she said. “Inside. It’s time for you to explain to me how time travel works.” He went where she told him to, and did what she said. How could he not? He was smitten. Fortunately for Ralph, Sylvie was likewise smitten. Many a woman would be, as he was a handsome man with good teeth, and he gave up his secrets readily.
Sylvie then traveled forward, to a time before she was born, and told her parents the secret of time travel. Her parents, who became the most famous temporal anthropologists in history, educated a few others and, when baby Sylvie came along, brought her up to leap gracefully from one century to the next. More gracefully, in fact, than her parents themselves, who vanished in medieval England when Sylvie was twelve. She was, in fact, looking for them when she came upon Ralph that very first time.
Ralph and Sylvie were married in Wessex in 1442, Ralph’s dental glory concealed by his fake teeth. Sylvie, inveterate time-traveler that she was, convinced him they should live in the timestream, giving them a sort of temporal immortality. And this is where Ralph, who was, after all, an engineer, not a physicist, failed to anticipate the effect of his actions.
Time does not fly like an arrow, it turns out. It just lies there, waiting for something new to happen. So when Ralph Drumm showed up — completely inappropriately — in the past, that past changed — the past healed itself — so that he had always been there. He acquired ancestors, was born, grew to adulthood — to Ralph’s exact age in fact — and his body just happened to be in the exact place where Ralph’s timeshadow showed up.
Time travel changes the past as well as the future: time is, in fact, an eternal present when viewed from outside the timestream.
So, as Ralph and Sylvie moved from time to time, they created more and more shadows of themselves in the timestream. As they had children — one, two, three, many — and took them about, the timeshadows of the Drumm children were generated and multiplied. Each shadow was as real as the original. Each shadow lived and breathed… and bred.
Although they were innocent of any ill intent, Ralph and Sylvie Drumm changed the flow of the stream of time in a way more profound than could be accomplished by any single action, no matter how momentous its apparent effect. Their genetic material came to dominate all of human history, an endless army of dark-haired, blue-eyed Caucasians with perfect teeth. They looked the same. They thought the same. They stuck together.
And this is why we, the last remnants of a differentiated humanity, are waiting here today in Wessex, in 1440 — to defend our future from the great surge of the Drummstream. This time, they will not escape us.
“Shed That Guilt! Double Your Productivity Overnight!”
Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn
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