Posted by PK on October 06, 2001 at 16:47:24:
"Don't any of you people eat meat?" Samantha protested. "What a bunch of lily-livered
wimps. What about these?" She opened her shirt. "Anybody hungry?"
I'm getting ahead of myself, or possibly behind. My time sense has never been congruent
with that of normal humanity. Possibly it started somewhen/where else. Let's try again.
Standard narrative style.
Samantha was restless. She'd finished her homework, the usual easy excercises in quantum
physics, practical thaumuturgy, temporal paradox and intermediate satire. Her shoes were
off. She was tired of blue skies and salads. She hated California in the summer. She wanted
rain, steak and kidney pudding, meaningless sex and beer. In this era and timeline she was
too young to drink. Nineteen wasn't old enough to enter a bar. She hated to disturb her great
uncle while he was working, but she did anyway.
"When am I going to get any FUN around here?" she wailed.
Her grand-uncle looked up absently from his scrutiny of a Feynmann circuit diagram. "My
dear child," he said indulgently. "You know perfectly well that until I repair the fault that
caused the sideslip we have no way of knowing where we will emerge in the eleven
dimensions." He shifted effortlessly into lecturing mode. "That means..."
"I know what it means," Sam snapped impatiently. "We're stuck in this politically primitive,
puritanical, pathetically pious..."
"Dear girl, it's just pre-sentience America, you know your history. Good work on the
alliteration, though. Do try to be patient, we'll be out of her as soon as I ..."
"I'm BORED," Samantha insisted.
"Well, we can't have that," her elderly relative chuckled. "Perhaps you're right..."
The Professor felt responsible for Samantha, as well he might. Without him, she would never
have been born. Her father had died defending England from the Vikings and was now
interred in a long barrow the archaeologists hadn't found yet. Her mother, a Cretan bull-
dancer the Professor had sort of adopted as she might possibly be his daughter - hard to be
sure with time travel - had got religion and jumped ship years ago on 24th century Rigel IV
where she was now a Church of England vicar in a peaceful little village. As a priestess of
Ishtar, her duties mainly consisted of pastoral work, organising seasonal festivals and
relieving anxious adolescent boys of their virginity. She was good at her job (part of her vow
entitled the villagers to sacrifice and eat her if she wasn't) but had no time for hopping around
the cosmos, whereas Sam had always liked to travel. He had eventually left her at the age of
twelve to get a nice, normal education in the relative safety of late twentieth century England,
but had been stuck with her again after she got expelled at age seventeen for offenses the
headmistress refused to discuss in detail.
The Professor opened another creaky door in the spacetime discontinuity ship Anastasia (he
had wanted to call it something snappy like Quasar but couldn't think of a convincing
acronym) and beckoned Sam to follow.
Sam had never ceased to wonder at how much the old guy could pack into the timeship. She
knew it had all started when he, an eccentric Victorian inventor and historian of possibly half
alien antecedents (hard to tell etc.) had got drunk with H.G. Wells and gone home with the
brilliant idea of building a time machine in his wardrobe as an aid to historical research. Well,
it was a big wardrobe.
"Okay, pops, what have you cooked up now?" she wondered.
The Professor opened a drawer in an antique bureau and produced a small item. "Something
appropriate to this primitive era," he teased.
"What is it?" she pestered impatiently.
"Fake ID," he chuckled. "And something else. Just in case you get into trouble..."
"ID!," Sam exclaimed. "At last!" It had been hell for her trying to get a drink in the USA,
where you can get draughted three years before you can legally buy a beer. Insane. It didn't
help that she wasn't very tall, despite her Saxon father, thanks to having a mother from
Minoan Crete, not a people renowned for their great height. She stood five feet five, with a
faintly olive complection, hazel/green eyes and dark chestnut hair; she could pass for a
buxom sixteen year old. She examined her papers. They gave her as a twenty two year old
postgraduate student from Oxford. Yes! "What something else?" As if I'd get into trouble, her
innocent look tried to convey.
"Just something I gave your mother to use in the old days, for when she got into a tight
corner." He handed her a rather chunky bracelet set with tiny stones.
"A bit baroque for me, but I'll bite. How does it work? And what sort of tight corners?"
"Oh, you know, when the locals captured her and tried to burn her as a witch, things like
that." He smiled reminiscently. "Ah, those wild days...."
"Happen a lot, did it? No, don't tell me. What does it do? Force field, blaster, levitation...?"
"Good heavens no. Wouldn't want to cause that sort of disruption, would we? You did do your
homework on temporal paradox, worldline splitting and the test on the safety rules?"
Sam sighed, but he was right. Gaudy use of futuristic and/or alien technology was a serious
infraction of the rules. "Okay, fine. So what does it do and how?"
The Professor explained. "So you see, it allows you to effect an escape without upsetting the
natives. Very neat, don't you think? I got it from those Time Lord chaps. Stuffy lot, but they
do have their uses."
"Like that sort-of-possibly-half-cousin of yours? The one who seems to spend all his time
fending off alien invasions? He whom we do not name?" The Prof didn't rise to the bait but
Sam backed off hastily. "Okay, okay. I'll be careful. But I'm hardly likely to get burned as a
witch here, now am I?"
"Don't be too sure. Just be glad we didn't land in Oklahoma." The Professor stuffed his briar
with his favourite mixture of Virginia tobacco and good old Moroccan hashish. "Now promise
me, no conjuring elementals in public, no more of the antics that got you expelled. I heard
Miss Frobisher mutter something about 'Bacchanalia' even if she wouldn't get any more
specific. She said you were a disruptive influence." He shook his head ruefully. Back in good
old Victorian England they had been content with hard science. All this new age stuff - well,
he had broadened his horizons considerably since then, but it he sometimes got nostalgic for
the certainties of his youth. "And please don't get involved with any of the locals. You know
what happened last time." He lit his pipe and tried to look wise and stern.
"Oh come on. Just because he was furry..."
"And his species have an unfortunate tendency to eat hominids. I really think..."
"If he'd tried that I'd have a nice fur coat. Come on, pops, I can look after myself." It was an
argument they'd been having for years. "You should get out a bit more yourself. Catch some
rays, as the locals say. You look a bit peaky."
"I thought you were bored with the sunshine." The Prof took a deep pull and his mind started
to drift. It could be a big help when trying to get a grip on non-Euclidian topologies but it did
tend to inhibit focussed conversation. He loved Sam dearly but she could be a bit of a
handful. Perhaps he should have insisted she stay with her mother? He shook his head. In
pastoral New Avalon she'd have gone mad with boredom or created chaos.
Sam considered doing something about the weather and hastily dismissed it. "It's okay, I can
stand it a bit longer." Now she was technically an adult by local standards there were
possibilities. She grinned. "Don't worry about it."
The phrase stirred alarm in her mentor's mind for a moment, but he let it go. Sam was
growing up, he thought fondly. She'll have to learn from her mistakes. A small voice
somewhere warned him that she was about to make a lot of even bigger ones before she was
done, but he ignored it.
Sam went back to her room. She had an idea she wanted to pursue. She touched her father's
sword, hanging over her bed, for luck. It was irrational, she knew, but it comforted her,
anchored her mercurial identity. She worked on her project until near dawn and fell asleep
on top of her wolfskin coverlet.
Mummy was an asteroid, Daddy was a small, non-stick kitchen utensil. Sam took the
earphones off. Her dreams had been odder than usual. She had climbed the wooden stairs
up the wardrobe until she reached the top of the tower that looked out on Arcturus. Falling
through a window into the void she had ended up in her mother's bedroom. As one does. Her
mother was occupied.
"You don't exist in this era," Sam had told her. Her mother's dark eyes were sleepy with
gratified desire. She brushed black hair back from her forehead. Her lover was sleeping the
sleep of the exhausted. "Hello, Sam," she said. "I hope this is important."
The next day, Sam could not remember a words of their conversation. She got washed and
dressed and found her way out of the wardrobe. So many rooms. It worried her sometimes.
The timeship was barely anchored in 'real' spacetime, it didn't actually occupy much of it.
Pops kept packing in folding dimensions. No wonder he had problems with the drive. One
day she'd have to learn how to fix it herself. She put on sunglasses and went out into the
glare...
"I told you," Sam slurred. "Not Australian. I'm from outer space. My mother is a priestess of
Ishtar unless she's changed her mind again. I'm King Arthur's illegitimate mistress."
This was untrue. Her attempt to seduce Crown Prince Arthur, now the king of Avalon (at least
three centuries in the future) had merely been a flirtation at a party. Since getting her adult ID
her social life had improved a bit. She had managed to find a hangout that sold Californian
real ale. Not bad at all. The locals were friendly and she could say anything she liked to
them, the place was full of nutcases who believed they'd been abducted by aliens.
Unfortunately a lot of them thought a good night's drinking was two glasses of weak white
wine and tofu salad was fit for human consumption. She felt a wave of evangelical zeal
coming over her.
She would get a teaching job at the local University. Shouldn't be hard. All she had to do was
fake some qualifcation in sociology or economics and she could bullshit her way through it.
Maybe Sam was right, the Professor thought. I should get out more. He was hardly any
further along with the repairs, perhaps a break would do him good. The problem with trying to
fix the Anastasia when it broke down, as it frequently did, was that he didn't fully understand
how it worked himself. His skills as an inventor were as much intuitive as based on the odds
and ends of science he'd picked up. Part of the design was based on some notes left in the
pocket of an Edwardian jacket that was all his mysterious father had left him, part on some
laudanum visions he'd had after reading one of those books that is usually described in
phrases like 'there are some things man was not meant to know.' Since then, he had cobbled
on bits as he needed them, some based on entirely alien technologies. He had learned a
good deal more formal and advanced science in the years since then, but none of it
explained the Annie. He lived in hope that he would one day find a sound, solid basis for
what it did. One day... He sighed and brushed his hands off on the shabby dressing gown he
wore in lieu of overalls. If he was going out he really ought to change. How many days had
they been here now? He really had no sense of time at all.
Getting a teaching job at the local campus was easy. It was an establishment of great wealth,
beauty and (for America) antiquity. That is, it was there in prehistoric times, before WWII. It
catered mainly for the children of the wealthy and ignorant, people who donated generously
in order to get their spoiled and dimwitted offspring some sort of diploma. All Sam needed to
get a job was show them her Oxford degree, speak in a British accent and imply she worked
reasonably cheap and could start tomorrow. She had decided to start with anthropology
because she'd visited a lot of strange alien cultures and she'd once read a book by Margaret
Meade.
The students were an entertaining study in anthropology themselves. They were divided
roughly into four groups. The Jocks'n'Bimbos were interested in football, dating football
players, panty raids and similar hilarious pranks, and smuggled beer. The nerds were
determined to get an education whether the staff provided one or not. The freaks (some
overlapping with the nerds) mostly stayed high and listened to music. The rest were the
politically correct activists, the sort of people who would automatically support anything
ethnic or pseudo-intellectually fashionable without worrying too much whether they were
making sense. Twerps, to Sam.
Sam's first class comprised a mixture of nerds, twerps who thought anthropology was
ethnically sound and a few J&B's who thought it was the same as sociology, good for an easy
credit.
"Hello, class," Sam started brightly. "Before we start the formal course I thought we might
want to warm up with some fun stuff. What do you want to start with, weird sex rites or
cannibalism?"
There was some muted muttering a few giggles but no direct reply until one of the jocks stuck
a tentative hand up. Sam nodded to him.
"Say, Miss? Aren't you kinda short for an Australian?"
The Professor was lost and a little disoriented. Possibly it was the heat and brightness,
though the sunglasses Sam had left for him seemed to help. Thoughtful of her. The
orientation tape she had recommended was less helpful, if appropriate in other ways. As he
listened to "California Girls" by the Beach Boys on his earphones he had to admit that the
local young women were very attractive. This was easy to see as many of them hardly
seemed to be wearing anything. He had hoped to find his way to an institute of learning in the
vicinity, there to converse with some authority on the more esoteric aspects of relativity and
quantum physics, but he was getting distracted by all these, what was the term? Hot babes.
He stared around, trying to get his bearings.
One bronzed blonde beauty skated to a neat halt in front of him. She was clad in two strips of
white material that obscured just enough of her anatomy to prevent her getting arrested.
"You lost?" she asked helpfully.
"Thank you, yes, I'm afraid I am," the Professor admitted. He explained his intentions as best
he could while trying not to ogle her breathtaking physique too obviously.
"Maybe I can help you with that," she said at last.
Sam's classes were going pretty well. Whenever she got back to the old Annie, her mentor
seemed to be asleep or out. She was on her own, winging it.
No problem.
The freaks were fun, once you learned their esoteric dialect. It was a blend of sixties hippie
and New Age babble with a bit of cybergeek thrown in. The potato brains were easy to
handle. The real fun was in walking a fine line between teasing the twerps and arousing the
suspicions of the nerds. They could read. Sooner or later, one of them would suspect that
half the anecdotes she fed them were made up. In fact, most of them were true, if a little
edited, as they'd happened in times and spaces she couldn't reasonably be expected to have
experienced. Very few of them were in the textbooks. Her classes were becoming popular,
more and more people came in to listen. If she wasn't careful, she might actually educate
somebody. Reviewing the mores of the social milieu she inhabited, she wondered if she
could get away with it.
She admitted to herself that she had pushed the envelope a bit too far when she had them
all dress up as Neanderthals and explain what they would do about a coming Ice Age.
The crunch came when the cafeteria went totally veggie. She came back from the counter
carrying a plate of rabbit food, muttering under her breath. The only open space was on a
table of her own students, one of whom was wearing a T-Shirt reading "Meat is Murder".
"I'd kill for a decent pint and a bacon sandwich," she said.
That provoked exactly the reaction she'd expected. After the babble subsided, she asked the
militant vegetarian when she proposed to exterminate all predators. "We''ll start with the
tigers," she suggested. "We can all have fur coats. I'll get the guns."
"That's not the same," the girl protested.
"They eat rice? Seaweed? How is it different? What about foxes?" She quoted a Snoopy
cartoon. "These people eat BUNNIES!"
The Prof was enjoying a very enlightening dialogue.....
Sam stood up and unbuttoned her shirt. "Don't any of you people eat meat?" she protested.
"What a bunch of lily-livered wimps. Stand up for your rights as carvivores. What about
these?" She opened her shirt. "Anybody hungry?"
That was the nailer. She had everybody's attention. She pulled off the rest of her clothes and
stepped onto the table. Muttering an invocation in Sumerian for luck, she stepped on a plate
of quiche. In English she said "Eat of my body," and fingered her bracelet. Then she fell
back onto the table, her head coming to rest in a salad dish. She was smoking, her body
smelled fragrantly of roasted meat.
The lone freak in the group broke the silence. "Fuckin' far out. What a rack." He licked his
lips as he viewed Sam's full and nicely cooked tits.
"Sexist pig," somebody commented.
"What are we going to do?"
"Somebody phone 911!"
"Too late for that."
"Hey, what happened to that freaky bracelet?"
The cooked body was totally naked, apart from a thin necklace.
Sam popped into the Anastasia's control room, nude of course, and sighed with relief. It had
worked. The teleport/replicator bracelet had functioned perfectly, whisking her back to safety
while leaving a lifeless but physically perfect copy of herself back where she'd come from.
That, of course, was how her mother had escaped the stake, the howling mobs and the
various other hazards of travelling in superstitious eras without disturbing the status quo. The
microwave device had been her own idea. She grinned as she mentally pictured the
consternation around the table. She wondered if any of them would be tempted...
What would she taste like anyway? Hmmm, possiblities there...
The Professor appeared, dressed in a silk kimono and slippers. "Oh, there you are, Sam. I
was becoming concerned." He raised his eyebrows at her lack of apparel. "Oh, dear. Are the
locals about to march on the castle again?"
"Hi Prof. Not exactly, but I think it might be time we moved on. You're looking better, I knew
a bit of fresh air would agree with you. In fact, don't you look a bit like that actor,
whatsisname..... hello, who's this?"
"It's a standard model..." The Prof deed indeed look better, by about thirty years. Not,
however, as good as the stunning blonde who emerged from the doorway behind him
wearing a short, white bathrobe.
"Ah, Sam, this is Buffy. Doctor Buffy....er...."
"Summerfield," the vision supplied. "Pleased to meet you, Sam." She offered a hand and the
robe fell open.
"Charmed, I'm sure." Sam said. "Prof, is the Annie any better?"
"I'm glad you asked. Dr Summerfield and I have had a very stimulating exchange of ideas,
she's helped me recalibrate the frammistat..."
And that's not all she's recalibrated, thought Sam gleefully. About time too. "Let's hit it, then,"
she said. "All ashore that's going ashore. You along for the ride, Doc?"
"You couldn't drag me away." said the blonde with enthusiasm.
"Okay then. Tally Ho!"
Sam hit the big red button on the master console, wondering too late if she should have
asked where the controls were set for. With a sound like a cosmic wardrobe door swinging
open in an echo chamber and a few coloured sparkles, the Anastasia slid out of that reality.