Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield

Author:Kate Heartfield
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: On the Limits of Patience

2145

PRUDENCE STEPS INTO 2145 and sees General Almo more or less where she left him, at his desk, the lights on his display table glimmering and shifting. It’s been perhaps two minutes here—long enough for one portal to close and another to open—while she’s spent a day in 2070.

“Well?” he asks. “How are you finding it? No changes at this end, yet, but I don’t expect any after one day.”

She nods, hopes she looks like a team player. “It’s a long game this time, General. I’ve published the books but we’ll need other changes to reinforce them or they’ll choir-preach. So I’ve connected with a couple of young people who will be involved in the 2091 Berlin Convention. Radical Misguided converts. Helmut Kauffmann and Rati Kapoor. If I change their life plans, they won’t meet Tremblay next year. Trying to seed events but also steering them away from activism to avoid stream-correction. The changes might take a bit of work before they show up.”

Her connection with Rati and Helmut might be visible to him; there must be some record of the apartment in their name, of her presence on the security cameras. And indeed, if she hadn’t come into their lives, Rati and Helmut would have become leaders in the movement to broaden access to manufactured organs, which would eventually have led to the disintegration of the household model of taxation and to the obsolescence of civil marriage. The Misguideds have agents at the Berlin Convention working to strengthen the declaration and polarize public opinion, so the Farmers are trying to head them off by working before 2091.

The thing that none of the Farmers will admit is that all their work only stretches the dialectic to greater extremes, accelerating the pace of the very change they’re trying to stop, and pushing it in directions the Misguideds don’t want it to go. History doesn’t self-correct in response to an attack; it metastasizes.

The general has his own version of a diary, but unlike laypeople, he doesn’t need to keep it in prehistory to keep it from changing. It’s a new technology, one that Prudence doesn’t understand. Somehow, the general’s display table exists in a bubble of space-time. Its energy costs don’t bear thinking about.

“Major Zuniga,” he says, not looking up from the table, “you have family in 2070, don’t you?”

He knows full well she does.

“My sister.”

During the long moment in which he does not answer, looking at his table, she wills him not to say What sister? Every time she shimmers, she thinks: perhaps this is the moment it all changes.

But instead he says, “Do what you must, but remember that you’ll spend weeks of your life on this, even if it passes in a blink of an eye from my perspective. I need you young and healthy and there is so much work to do. If history won’t nudge in the direction you want in Toronto in 2070, I’ll redeploy you somewhere else. ‘Our patience will achieve more than our force.

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