Chronica Read online

"Thank you," Max and Sierra said, ignoring the smile. They walked to Fifth Avenue and turned north.

  "Do they have microfiche in use yet?" Sierra asked Max.

  Max scrunched his face. "It's been invented already, for sure. But I don't think it's in common use in libraries as yet. But they should have copies of the newspapers themselves that we can look through."

  Sierra looked up the Avenue. "The Library's about 20 blocks north – should we walk it?"

  "Those horse-drawn carriages look like fun," Max said.

  "We could probably walk faster," Sierra said, gesturing to a slow-moving carriage that now stopped and discharged a passenger.

  "Where's your sense of adventure?" Max asked, playfully.

  "Ok, we'll take the damned horse," Sierra said, and waved to the driver, who nodded back at them.

  "Wait," Max said. "Did you take any money with you from the hotel?"

  Sierra shook her head no, and waved the driver off. He nodded again and continued north with his horse-drawn carriage.

  "How much is the fare?" Max asked Sierra. "A penny?"

  "Doesn't matter," Sierra said. "It's a penny we don't have."

  "We should have asked Astor for some cash," Max said, "a time traveler's per diem." And the two began their walk up Fifth Avenue.

  ***

  The walk was the longest the two had taken in the 1890s, and filled with everyday history come to pulsating life. They encountered boys and girls selling newspapers in the middle of the Avenue – "no child labor laws back here," Sierra mentioned – and vendors of all ages, raucously hawking their wares on the sidewalks. "Bootblacks," Max looked at a row of men polishing shoes and boots against a wrought-iron railing, and then at his own footwear. They were a pair of nondescript shoes from the future that didn't look too out of place in 1890s, and never needed polishing.

  They encountered someone far more interesting as they crossed 60th Street. Sierra gestured to a man walking towards them, very thin, well dressed, about 40 years of age. His black hair was parted in the middle and he had a moustache, like many men in this city at this time, including John Jacob Astor, except Astor's hair was lighter and his moustache a little longer.

  "I'm pretty sure that's Nikola Tesla," Sierra said, and slowed down to a halt.

  "Should we talk to him?" Max asked. "How can we not?"

  Sierra agreed. "This time and place has more famous people walking around than Ancient Athens or the Library of Alexandria," she said.

  The man was in nodding distance. He caught Sierra's eye and smiled.

  "Nikola Tesla?" Max asked and extended his hand for a handshake. "We're—"

  Tesla took the hand and widened his smile. "I know who you are, and I'm pleased indeed to meet you."

  Chapter 4

  [Rome, 1615 AD]

  Heron had an instinct. He would not find much else of use to him in this time and place. He had brokered the potentially disastrous conflict between science and the Church, with neither side fully understanding what had happened. Science would progress and the Church would continue. He'd had more than his fill of those longwinded sanctimonious Church fathers. He believed in no God, except what was in himself, and he knew that the Church and all dogmatic religion did plenty of damage to humankind. But he also believed that humanity was always in need of some moral guidance, especially in this age, as the Renaissance was about to move into full gear.

  He also had concluded that Sierra Waters or whatever she now called herself was not here. Heron had come here in the first place because his erstwhile colleague in 150 AD Alexandria, Claudius Ptolemy, had been concerned that Sierra Waters might have come to this early Renaissance time to coax Galileo in his Copernican, anti-Ptolemaic ideas. But Heron could find no sign of her here.

  He thought she was no longer in the further past, either. There was nothing left of Alexandria now, had not been for nearly a millennium, and if she had been back there even earlier – had traveled back there after she had feigned her own horrible death as Hypatia – then he would have known about it. There would have been some sign of her. What he did know, or at least strongly suspected, is that she had taken his Chronica before the Library has burned – the book he had foolishly written in his vain youth, teaching her and all the world about the mechanics of time travel, and, worse than that, what could be done with it.

  But if she was neither here nor in the past, that left just one time – the future. But where? He had at one time installed a tracking device on all of the Chairs, which would have told him where and when Sierra Waters was now. But she had apparently disabled that, some time in the future, as she had done with so much of his work.

  Heron sighed. There was one man, that puttering nuisance William Appleton, who might know the whereabouts of Sierra Waters.

  Heron booked passage to Athens. He had toyed, many times, with setting up a portal here in Rome, but had always concluded that the convenience was not worth the danger. The Vatican had too many priests with too much time on their hands. Sooner or later one of them would stumble onto the room with the Chairs, and that could create complications Heron did not want to engage.

  [Athens, 1615 AD]

  The sailing voyage to Athens was smooth. Hakam was fortunately right inside his coffee house.

  "The business with the Cardinal and the scientist was concluded to your satisfaction?" Hakam asked, after the formalities of greeting had been concluded.

  "Very much so," Heron replied, and gave Hakam a pouch of silver. It was much in excess of what Heron usually paid for this work, but he had come to rely on Hakam's efficiency.

  Hakam gestured to the room beyond the room. "All is ready for you," he said.

  Heron thanked him again, entered the room, and locked the door. He looked at himself in the small mirror on the wall. He had had his face DNA-fashioned to look like St. Augustine, but that had not been needed for his sojourn here in the early 1600s. He knew exactly what the real Augustine had looked like – he had conversed with him, long into the night, enough times – but Bellarmine and these priests hadn't the vaguest idea. The surviving pictures of the saint looked nothing like the man.

  Heron sat in the Chair and set it for the future, 2087 to be exact, where the technology for precise facial reconstruction was readily obtainable. His first step would be to set his face to someone recognizable as a friend of Appleton in the 1890s. Then he would travel back to 1899, shortly before Appleton's death, and see what he could wring out of the man in the last months of his life, when he would be too weak to travel anywhere to sound the alarm on Heron's visit, if somehow Appleton were to realize who Heron was.

  Heron lowered the go lever and the bubble ascended. He stroked his upper lip with the second knuckle of his right hand. He would need to grow a moustache.

  [New York City, March, 1899 AD]

  The new face and the flight to New York City in 2087 were easy. The trip back to 1899 – or what Heron hoped to do there – would be more difficult. Fortunately, speaking English in a way that did not attract attention would be no problem. Heron was a polymath when it came to language, and the melting pot par excellence that New York City was in the 1890s would provide suitable cover for anything he said that might have differed from the usual dialects heard around town.

  Heron walked down the winding flight of stairs with his new face in the Millennium Club, nearly a year before the 20th century, depending upon how you counted it. Whichever way it was categorized, Heron knew the century ahead would be pivotal for humanity.

  Cyril Charles, the unctuous dope, was in the vestibule of the club. These doormen – Heron thought of them as doormats - traveled through time more frequently than Heron, and apparently owed allegiance to no one but themselves. Heron had long been intending to do something about them, but was always caught up in matters more pressing.

  Charles greeted Heron in his disguise with a smile and a bow. Heron had a small band of people back here who know who he was, and upon whom he could rely. He was glad Mr. Charles
was not among them.

  Heron walked out onto Fifth Avenue. The remnants of the huge snowstorm that had hit the entire East Coast last month, including New York City, were still on the street. He supposed he could have come back a month or two later. But Appleton was due to die in October, and with Heron not wanting to interfere with that, he didn't want to cut this too close. He had a firm policy of interfering as little as possible with the natural course of events.

  Of course, that begged the question of what was the natural course? Heron often considered that the history as he had encountered it was not the natural course of events, but as some other manipulator in time had made them happen. That manipulator could have been Sierra Waters, or a later version of himself, or someone he had no knowledge of at all.

  Heron shivered. It was colder here in March 1899 New York than he had expected. Or maybe he was more vulnerable to the cold than usual, having spent so much recent time in more temperate climates. Fortunately, he spotted a men's apparel shop across the street. And he had come prepared with plenty of 1890s American coin. He quickly purchased a woolen overcoat, which fit well over the woolen waistcoat he was wearing, and walked back out onto Fifth Avenue.

  He headed south, to Grand Central Terminal, where he would place a call on a public telephone to one of his minions. Several men on the street nodded at him as he proceeded. Possibly they recognized his new face. That didn't matter. In this day and age, communication had not yet progressed to the point at which everyone knew where famous people were, by virtue of their ubiquitous little messages on tiny telephones. Likely no one on the street personally knew the true possessor of Heron's current face, so the chances were slim that someone who attempted to converse with him would realize that he wasn't who he appeared to be.

  He reached Grand Central Terminal and made his call. "Let's meet at the seafood restaurant in 20 minutes," Heron told his associate, who said he would be there shortly. Heron had developed a taste for seafood in Alexandria. He knew the Oyster Bar would be opening in Grand Central Terminal in a little more than a decade. In the meantime, the current establishment would have to do.

  Heron left his new coat on the back of the chair he was shown to, in a quiet corner of the restaurant. Coat checks were a good few decades away.

  He ordered an unflavored seltzer water, to start. He needed a clear head. "Very good, sir," the waiter responded. "And good to see you back here again!"

  The waiter returned with the seltzer and a copy of The New York Times. "And may I say you were very right to back this in 1896 – this is the best newspaper in New York City. I read it every day!"

  "Thank you," Heron said. His newly adopted lookalike had indeed financed Adolph Simon Ochs' purchase of this newspaper in 1896. Heron was mildly surprised that this was known by his waiter – but, here in New York City for the next few centuries, actors and actresses and authors and all kinds of people who were trying to become important took up restaurant work in their lean times.

  Heron's man approached. He was in his twenties, had the same style of hair as Heron – parted a little more in the middle – and a moustache, too. "Good to see you, J. P.," he said to Heron, with a little wink.

  "Mr. Porter," Heron motioned his associate to take a seat and got right down to business. "I need you to find out something very specific about William Henry Appleton," he said.

  "The publisher?"

  "Yes," Heron replied. The waiter arrived with a menu and a request for a drink order from Heron's associate. "I'll have a scotch whiskey, your best single malt, no ice," Porter said.

  "Very good sir," the waiter said and left.

  "You expecting me to pay for that?" Heron asked Porter.

  "I—"

  "I'm only joking," Heron said and laughed loudly. "Of course I will! It supports my impersonation of J. P. Morgan!"

  ***

  The two dined on raw oysters. Heron smacked his lips. "So the key is the Chronica," he said to Porter, who was on his second scotch. "I've scoured every catalog well into the future, and there is not a sign of it. Which means, if Appleton has it, he has not yet been able to publish it."

  "Is it possible this Sierra Waters never got it out of the pyres of Alexandria?" Porter asked.

  "I would not rule that out. But I have learned the hard way not to underestimate the intelligence and the talent of that woman," Heron said. "The safest course of action is to assume that she indeed took the Chronica."

  "Perhaps she gave it to someone other than Appleton," Porter suggested.

  "Yes, that's of course possible, too," Heron said. "But as far as I know, the only one in Sierra Waters' circle in a position to get anything published is this Appleton. So he would be a good place to start."

  Porter nodded. "Is Appleton fluent enough in Greek to do the translation? And, for that matter, does he command the mathematics? From what I have seen of your work, the equations are well beyond the average general publisher."

  "Good questions," Heron replied. "I assume he is not. So that raises the question of whom would he entrust with such a momentous task. See if you can find that out from Appleton, too."

  "I shall do my best," Porter said.

  Heron stood, signaling that this meeting was over. "I know that you will, Mr. Porter."

  ***

  Edwin Stanton Porter was currently in the employ not only of Heron, but of Thomas Edison and his associates. Porter sometimes suspected that Edison knew Heron, but never dared to ask either man. Being in league with a man from the future would certainly explain Edison's outpouring of inventions – not only in moving pictures, Porter's specialty, but in recording of sound, electrical lighting, and the like. His primary employer, Edison, was at this point probably the greatest inventor in history. The only possible competition might be Leonardo – but he had only sketched most of his great inventions, not brought them into physical being and usage as had Thomas Edison. Other inventors in this century – Morse, Daguerre, Bell – had just one great invention to their credit, in contrast to Edison's dozens.

  Porter hopped on a southbound motorized carriage on Fifth Avenue. He spotted Mark Twain walking north, resplendent in his white suit.

  Porter had an appointment in a café on Broadway with another of Edison's photographers – erstwhile, for the past few years – William Dickson. He was 10 years older than Porter, and was widely considered the real brains behind Edison's kinetoscope moving-picture machine. He had the same moustache and sideburns as Porter, who considered Dickson an older brother. Perhaps Dickson could be of help with how to best approach William Henry Appleton.

  Dickson rose to greet Porter with a firm handshake and big toothy smile. "Good to see you again, good to be back in New York," Dickson said in his Scottish accent. "As much as I love London, I miss the energy of New York!"

  Porter sat and the two ordered pints. After catching up with each other's doings, Porter told Dickson about the job Heron had given him. Porter may have suspected that Edison was in league with Heron, but he knew for a fact that Dickson had done many things for the strange man over the years.

  Dickson considered. "Mary Anderson," he said after a few moments. "Take her with you to see Appleton. I had a delightful time with her in London last year – almost talked her into making one of my 'What the butler saw' little photo-plays. You know what those are?"

  Porter nodded and grinned broadly. "Scantily clad aristocratic women further undressing, usually by the sea shore! A true milestone in photography!"

  "Yes," Dickson said, and chuckled appreciatively. "And I learned that Miss Anderson has an abiding interest in Hypatia – which, as everyone knows, is one of Appleton's consuming devotions."

  "I heard she's preparing for a performance as Hypatia in the play of the same name, based on Charles Kingsley's novel," Porter said.