But Gran didn't seem to mind. She even kind of smiled. And she finally noticed Beckie was still beside her, and she hadn't fallen back into the 2030s or whenever they were talking about. "Yes, this here's Beckie Royer. She's my daughter Trish's little girl."
"Hello, Beckie." Mrs. Springer smiled, too. She looked nice, even if she did have a face like a horse. "I'm right pleased to meet you."
"Pleased to meet you, too." A handful of words, but they showed how much she was out of place in Elizabeth. In California, she sounded just like everybody else. Here, she showed she was a stranger—a foreigner (furriner, they'd say here)—every time she opened her mouth. She didn't like that. Even in Ohio, she'd sounded funny. She sounded more than funny on this side of the border.
"What's your father do?" Daisy Springer asked.
"He's a bioengineer," Beckie said.
"How about that?" Mrs. Springer said. Beckie wondered if she even knew what a bioengineer did. But she must have, because she went on, "There's a fish hatchery over by Palestine, a couple of miles south of here."
"Is there? That might be interesting." Beckie had to think how far two miles was—somewhere around three kilometers. California had been metric for more than 150 years. Some states still clung to the old way of measuring, though. North America was almost as much of a crazy quilt as Europe was.
"Where will y'all be staying?" Mrs. Springer asked Gran. Y'all. They really did talk like that! It wasn't just a joke on TV and in the movies.
"With Ted and Ethel Snodgrass," Gran answered. "Ethel's my first cousin, you know."
"Well, I do now that you remind me, but I plumb forgot," Daisy Springer said. She hadn't had to worry about who Gran's relatives were for longer than Beckie's mother was alive. "Down on Prunty Street, then." She didn't make it a question. She knew where the Snodgrasses—what a name!—lived.
Gran nodded. "That's right."
"What's it like in California?" Mrs. Springer sounded wistful. "Is it really as ... as nice as all the shows make it out to be?"
"Not on your life," Gran said before Beckie could answer. "It's hot like you wouldn't believe in the summertime. People are rude. They don't know their place. You can't grow apples or pears, on account of you never get a frost. You can't imagine how terrible the traffic is. My son-in-law pays me no mind, and my daughter's just about as bad. They—"
Beckie stopped listening. She'd heard all of this a million times before, even if it was new and fascinating to Mrs. Springer. Would they ever get out of the hot sun and over to the Snodgrasses' house? Beckie wouldn't have bet on it. When Gran started grumbling, she could go on for days.
"Are you ready?" the operator asked as Justin Monroe and his mother got into the transposition chamber.
"Of course not," Mom answered. The operator blinked. Then she decided it was a joke and laughed. Justin smiled himself. His mother liked giving dumb questions crazy answers. She looked at the operator and said, "Are you ready?"
"If I have to be," the operator said. She didn't seem to have any imagination to speak of. Justin wasn't surprised. You didn't need much in the way of brains to sit in the operator's chair. Crosstime Traffic paid operators to be glorified spare tires. Computers guided transposition chambers from the home timeline to an alternate, or from one alternate to another. If something went wrong (which hardly ever happened), the operator could take over and bring the chamber home with manual controls (if she or he was very, very lucky).
Justin sat down and fastened his seat belt. The seats in the chamber were like the ones in airplanes, all the way down to not giving enough legroom. Justin was tall and lanky—just over one meter, ninety centimeters—so he found that especially annoying.
Six feet three, he reminded himself. I'm six feet three. In the alternate where he and his mother were going, Virginia still used the old-fashioned measurements. He'd learned inches and feet and yards and miles and ounces and pounds and pints and quarts and gallons and bushels and the rest of those foolish values. He'd learned them, and he could use them, but they struck him as an enormous waste of time. Why twelve inches to a foot, or 5,280 feet to a mile? How were you supposed to keep track of stuff like that? Counting by tens was so much easier.
"Oh, one more thing," the operator said. "I need your slavery declarations."
"Right." Mom took hers out of her purse and handed it to the woman. Justin had his in a back pocket of his jeans— dungarees, people called them in the alternate where they were headed. The denim was dyed a light brown, not the blue that had been most popular in the home timeline for more than two hundred years.
"Thank you." The operator put them in a manila folder. Crosstime Traffic was supposed to get the most it could from the alternates while exploiting the people in them as little as possible. The year before, though, a scandal had rocked the home timeline's biggest corporation. People, some of them in high places, bought and sold and owned natives of low-tech alternates—not to make money or anything, but just for the thrill of power.
Government regulations came down in a flood. All over the world, governments had been waiting for an excuse to crack down on Crosstime Traffic. Now they had one. The slavery declarations were part of that. Justin and his mother both pledged not to have anything to do with enslaving anybody. That had always been against the rules, of course, but now they had to sign a paper that said they knew it was against the rules. How much good that signed sheet of paper would do. ... Well, some bureaucrat somewhere thought it was a good idea.
Even though the alternate the Monroes were going to wasn't low-tech, the slavery declarations did matter there more than they would have in some other alternates. Discrimination survived over much of that changed North America, even if slavery was formally against the law everywhere.
"Why didn't they ratify the Constitution in that alternate?" Justin asked.
"They couldn't agree on how to set up the legislature," Mom answered. "The big states wanted it based on population. The little ones wanted each state to have one vote no matter how many people it had. They were too stubborn to split the difference, the way they did here."
"That's right. I remember now. And so they kept the Articles of Confederation instead." Justin made a face. U.S. history went on and on about all the ways the Articles didn't work. This alternate was a history text brought to life.
"They kept them—and then after a while they forgot about them," Mom said. "They still call countries in North America states, and a lot of them have the same names as states in the United States in the home timeline, but they're countries, and there's no United States in that alternate."
"Here we go," the operator said. A few lights glowed and changed color in the instrument panel in front of her. It didn't feel as if the transposition chamber was going anywhere. In one sense, it wasn't. It started out in an underground room in Charleston, West Virginia. It would end up in an underground room in Charleston, too.
But in the alternate where it was going, Charleston was part of Virginia, not of West Virginia. In the home timeline, Virginia seceded from the United States in 1861, as the Civil War was starting. Then West Virginia seceded from Virginia and got admitted to the Union as a separate state. There was no Civil War in that alternate. By the 1860s, the United States had already quietly fallen apart. There were lots of small and medium-sized wars between states, but never one great big one.
"We're going to have to be careful here," Mom warned. "This is a high-tech alternate. Except for traveling crosstime, they know almost as much as we do. We have to make sure we don't draw the wrong kind of attention to ourselves."