TimeSnip

By Cat Rambo

I didn’t hope for much when I went around to Roderico’s office. Maybe a chance to record some new tapes, at least, get a little spending cash. The Institute covers room and board, but not much else. And lately, they’ve proved less willing to fund me on sales missions, visiting system to system to pitch their services – my success rate has been bad.

I don’t know if Roderico’s a timesnip like me or not. His office doesn’t have the usual retro-detritus as décor that many do. Lots of the timesnippers take sidetrips and grab things they like. As long as they don’t fall into the category of Artifacts, no one calls them on it. I’d have volunteered for the job if I could have, but timesnips can’t become snippers, because of the physics of it all. They yank us out of the timeline, there’s a buzz and whirl of interviews, and then when the dust settles, there you are, trapped in the future while the person you used to be labors on in the past.

Roderico was napping in his office when I went in. I tapped on the desk and he jerked awake, relaxing when he saw it was me.

“Greetings, Victoria,” he said, yawning and stretching. “Did you have an appointment?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m low on cash, Roderico. Any projects up for grabs?”

“Let me run a query.” He tugged a data window open in the air before him and began to scroll through it. I settled onto a chair to watch him.

His face was lean and dark, Mediterranean blood somewhere in his background – or tweaked into it, I reminded myself – and eyes glittering like a dark war.

His eyebrows rose. “You’re in luck. This has been in the system about thirty seconds so far if you want to jump on it. We’ve got an Initial Pitch  . . .”

“Put my name in,” I said.

“No details?”

Initial Pitches are major money. “Just put my name in,” I said. In a few minutes the outside records would update and every saleslancer in the system would be aware of it. I wanted it.

He keyed my name in and sent it. It would take a few minutes for the system to confirm that I had the job, and there was no guarantee someone hadn’t already spotted it and earned a tipoff fee. But the window chimed and we both smiled.

“All right,” said Roderico. He glanced over the details. “You’ll leave in a day – here’s a datasheet.” He gave me a silvery coin and I tucked it away.

I set a tea cube steeping and wandered through the pages of the datasheet. I didn’t have the air interface that Roderico boasted in his office, so I unrolled my own square of black shiny fabric, no sign of its weave, and slotted the disk into its pocket.

The Tedum were a patriarchal, polygamous society, one of the many spread out human colonies. I rolled my eyes at that – I’ve never been fond of patriarchies. It’s my greatest disappointment in the future, that the men’s nonsense hadn’t been eradicated. Instead, you had every possible variety of it, and only a handful of female dominant or egalitarian populations. Luckily, the largest of the gender neutral systems was Galactic Citizenship, and I’d bought my way into that as soon as I could.

Still, an Initial Pitch was major money. I kept reading.

The Tedum had harems. Younger men tended to be enlisted in the armies – three rival nations kept up ongoing, bloody conflicts that kept the number of males who reached thirty, the age for marriage, relatively low.

The documents had been badly translated – I suspected that no program had been available and some non-Standard language speaker had taken a stab at it.

I didn’t have much time and I’d never been a fast reader. They say they can input data into your head faster than you can think, but I still need to go over it piece by piece and worry it into the right shape in my mind. So I picked the following to read on the three-day trip:

The geographical overview:

 A mountainous planet whose largest predator was a six legged ursine-type that stood two meters tall and blended with the rocky cliffs. Two major cities, with trade flowing between them. I would be staying in Tabor, the larger of the two, which focused on textile manufacturing. The smaller of the two was called Luxat.

The  economic overview:

 A small trade in handicrafts and high-end goods, including furs from the ursines, which were called rawrs. Minerals used in manufacturing glass. Dried fish that were consumed by several species. A thick woven wool cloth.

I read through several months backlog of their primary mediapubs as well. There were men’s and women’s sections, with the men’s devoted to trade agreements, finances,  military skirmishes, exchanges with the bandit tribes living in the hills, sports, which focused on a sport called Pummel, a sort of team-based wrestling/boxing.

The women’s section held weather, housekeeping, and a surprisingly rich literary scene. Five of the eight pages were reviews of literary magazines and poetry, rhyme schemes pattered like jeweled bracelets, intricate and rich with formal strictures.

At the spaceport near the Ardus System, I left the larger cruiser for a shuttle down to the planet. The spaceport was loud and busy, lines of people crossing other lines, the floors marked with thickly textured lines designating different companies.

A Tedum, dressed in a briskly formal uniform with golden rickrack along the pockets, checked my ID disk, sliding it through the boxy reader he carried on a woven black wool strap. As he handed it back, looking politely over my shoulder to avoid meeting my gaze, he said, “A word of caution, ma’am. You’ll want to dress more circumspectly on the planet.”

I do hate patriarchies, so I’ll admit I might have been spoiling for a fight. “What do you mean?” I said, staring at him.

“Our women wear dresses,” he said.

“Your women don’t conduct diplomatic missions, either,” I said. “I’m afraid that on this trip, you will have to treat me as an honorary male.”

Standard policy, but I took relish in saying it.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, still looking over my shoulder. “Have a pleasant stay on Argus-3, ma’am.”

—

The shuttle was small – seven of us, counting the pilot, who was a borg-box. The other passengers were all male Tedum. One, Avi, was my guiding attendant, come to accompany me to Tabor. Like the other men, he would not look me in the face, but he chattered to me pleasantly enough.

“So how far in time have you come forward?” he said.

“Four hundred and thirty-two years from the point where they took me,” I said. “Humans had an average lifespan of approximately fifty years at that point.”

“It must have been quite a shock for you!” he said. “What was the biggest change?”

“The food,” I said. “We ate less processed food.”

“You will like Tabor, then,” he said. “The residence where you will be accommodated has a fine cook. Usually she serves the Ambassador from Luxat, but he has offered her up to your service to show that Luxat also wishes to welcome the Institute.”

Sometimes the Institute is a hard sell to a population, but it was clear that this one already saw the advantages of being able to snip leaders from its past and bring them up to advance the current civilization. I relaxed in my seat. Despite the social structure, it would be an easy tour, and I’d go home with a split of the overall contract, enough to carry me through almost a year, maybe more, depending on how heavily the cities wanted to buy.

I had declined language training. My mind just isn’t suited for it – it gives me migraines and still leaves me unable to assemble anything but the most rudimentary sentences. So Avi would be my interpreter.

He was fair-haired and pale, thick blonde hair falling to obscure the age lines marking the corners of his unfocused blue eyes. A line of thin garnets was set into the cartilage of his right ear, extending upward, graduated in size to become smaller and smaller until they were only dots against the pink skin. I would be they weren’t ornamental, but I couldn’t guess their purpose. As I watched, though, he absently fingered the edge of his ear, in a pattern that seemed deliberate. A covert communication device, then, I thought.

He was human, like myself, the descendent of the bio-modified settlers that had landed on the planet two hundred years ago. I had skimmed their history, which had presented that landing in bland, uninformative terms: a group of five thousand from Earth, divided into the two settlements.

There were no mention of the names of those who had settled them, and the history seemed to start at the approximately fifty years after the original settlement. It was an odd gap, and one I’d have to investigate.

“Have you visited many planets since you arrived here?” Avi asked.

“This will be my sixteenth.”

“Ah, you are quite experienced, then.”

Another passenger whispered something to the man by his side, and they chuckled, glancing at me before returning their gazes out the window.

“We will arrive in another two hours,” Avi said, leaning forward and drawing my attention away from the pair. “I will take you to your accommodations, and let you refresh yourself. This evening there will be a celebration at General Nazra’s estate and you will meet a great many people. The following day, you will present your company’s offerings to a government assembly. Many of the attending will be the same at both events. I have prepared a list that may be of use to you.”

I unrolled my interface and took the dataload in order to study it for the rest of the flight. Avi passed around juice bulbs to everyone and I sucked on the liquid as I scrolled through photographs and notes. The General was a grizzled, scarred man with piercing green eyes. Like Avi and every other man in the shuttle, his hair was luxuriant and long.

Sometimes I wondered if that was what had surprised me most when arriving in this century: everyone was so perfect. You didn’t see rotting teeth, or eyeglasses, or bad breath, or any of the thousand other flaws that people had been riddled with in my century. Susan B. Anthony squinted, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was overweight.  It was an odd sensation, although I’d never been dissatisfied with my face or figure. Without the benefit of genetic manipulation, I’d lured in marks and stockbrokers, spoken before the United States Congress, and even in my fifties, or so I was told, had enticed an English banker to defy his parents and marry me.

The planet wobbled towards us on the front screen: a brown and white marble rolling downhill.  Avi smiled.

“About twenty minutes more,” he said.

—

The quarters they had for me were luxurious by any standards: thick stone walls cushioned by woolen tapestries that showed chimeric monsters and soldiers with shoulder-mounted mortars.

“Those are rawr,” Avi said.

“That’s not how I pictured them,” I said.  “Do they really have three heads?”

“Yes, some of the ones furthest in the mountains,” he said.

A thin man dressed in mauve corduroy and leather stood in the doorway, watching me.  When I turned towards him, he looked away.

“This is Stentor,” Avi said. “He will assist you with dressing and serve you at the table.”

I was surprised and said so.  “You cannot provide me with a woman to assist me?”

“It is not a thing a decent woman would do,” Avi said, his tone unapologetic.  “Stentor is without family and is well paid for his labors.”

“Very well,” I said.

Upstairs the bed was a mass of feather comforters.  Before I could go to sleep, Stentor insisted on measuring me with a small paper tape.

“I don’t intend to wear native clothing,” I said in warning and he shrugged.

“I’m just doing my job, milady,” he said. “I just give them the tapes and then you can tell them no, eh?”  He chuckled dryly.

I shrugged and let him circle my wrist, my arm, my waist, my neck, my bust, my hips.  He wrote numbers on the tape.  Then he walked me through the basics of the water closet and left.  I took off my clothes and crawled into the bed.  The linens were chilly at first, but warmed quickly.  I could hear the wind howling against the fretted lines of the shuttered window, and a pane rattling at intervals.

I slept sporadically, falling in and out of sleep, dreaming of the last few moments of planetfall, the corrugated surface plummeting up at us, and then catching myself as thunder cracked somewhere outside. I opened my eyes to see lightning illuminate the room like a photographer’s flash, a brilliant image that sprang out at you, then lingered in one’s darkening vision.  The monsters capered on the wall in afterthought, prancing in menace.

At dawn, oyster-colored light washed in through the shutters to paint slats of brilliance across the gray floor.  I opened the shutters and leaned out.

The house was towards the upper end of a hill. The window looked out over a long sweep of stone houses and far beyond, to circular towers that sent soot-laden dark columns into the air.  Overhead, two smoke-colored birds circled each other silently.

There was a knock at the door and Stentor entered.  He had several dresses across his arm, and carried a bag in the other. I shook my head.

 ”My clothing will function,” I said.

“This is a formal occasion.” He laid the dresses on the bed: one was a cobwebby gray silk that managed to be concealing, for all its filminess.  The other two were brown and black and made no bones about their respectability.  I touched my blue jumpsuit and dialed the color down to black.  Tweaking the cuffs lengthened them and made the shirt blousier.  The neckline was equally easy to adjust.  But Stentor still did not look happy.

 ”Respectable women…” he said.

“Respectable women live in harems here,” I said dryly.  “Believe me, I have no desire to be a respectable woman.”

He stood there, frowning at me.

“I let you take my measurements last night so you wouldn’t get into trouble,” I said. “But I warned you at the time, I wouldn’t wear native dress.”

He shrugged and gathered up the dresses.  But rather than removing them from the room, he hung them in the wardrobe flanking the bed and set the shoes and undergarments on the appropriate shelves.  He left the room.

The shower had multiple heads that protruded from three sides, spraying a hot, soft mist on my body, and the soap was soft and scented with some sort of spicy floral.  I rinsed my jumpsuit at the same time to make sure it was fully charged and clean.  Out of the shower, I touched its electrostatic tag and let it dump its excess moisture in the sink.

I wore an everlasting white rose at my throat.  I had packed it in my reticule along with necessities like my datapad and my fresher.  The Institute had made it for me.

Avi was not impressed by the outfit, I could tell by the impatient hover of his eyebrows.  But he handed me into the motorcar and followed me in.

We drove through dark, winding streets and outside of town, where the stars stretched overhead, up a long stretch of mountainside.  We passed through several checkpoints along the way; each time the driver passed up his identification.  At the third point, a soldier peered into the car, looking straight at me.  He shouted something over his shoulder and was greeted with a burst of laughter.  I folded my hands in my lap and looked out at the trees beside the road.  Avi snapped something at the driver and we moved along.

We were high enough that snow fell outside the car on the shaggy, humped trees that clutched at the rocky hillside.  Finally we drew up outside a high iron gate, capped with black arrows that pointed up into the snowy sky.  A pair of soldiers checked the driver’s identification and waved us through once the gates shuddered and opened.

The house was high-ceilinged and ablaze with lights. Off to one side several men sat in a circle with guitar and drums, sending out a light, easy melody.  Several men danced with young girls near the players, but most of the women were clustered in the parlor, chattering with each other.  Their high, light voices were like birds, but they stilled as we stepped into the main hallway and the outliers caught sight of me.

An elderly woman in steel gray caught my eye.  She stood, looking at me but before she could move forward, the General was there, bowing.  He offered me his arm and swept me into another room, where a circle of men in uniforms and dress clothes waited to bow and shake my hand in turn.

They settled me onto a well-upholstered chair, and a liveried servant brought glasses of thin, bubbly wine and crackers spread with meat paste.  Our talk was inconsequential – inquiries after my journey, or how I liked my accommodations.

I waited for a woman to be brought forward to meet me, but several hours passed with no such move.  I drank my wine and nibbled on the crackers.  Finally I stood and asked my way to the necessary.  A servant guided me halfway, then hovered an unobtrusive few steps away as I entered.

I waited fifteen minutes, but no other women came in.  Finally there was a soft knock from the servant on the door.  I washed my hands and exited.  When I left, I did not make my way back to the room where I had been seated, but instead went to the parlor.

A hush fell on the room again as I entered.  I stood there, looking around at them as they stared back.  The elderly woman made her way over to me. She had a hawklike, craggy face and her eyes glittered at me in something like approval.

“I am Dame Ilias,” she said.  She curtsied and I mimicked the gesture, the two of us inclining our bodies to each other.  She paused, glancing at the doorway, where the General had appeared.  “Perhaps you will do me the courtesy of paying a visit in two days, in the afternoon?  We will have an early supper.  Tell Avi and he will bring you.”

“Very well,” I said.  The General called to me and I returned to his side to be guided into the men’s room again.

When the men finished dancing with the young girls, they escorted them back into the parlor and returned to the room where I was.  One made his way over to me.

“You are enjoying the music?” he said.  He leaned over and helped himself to a cracker from my plate.  “May I bring you more wine?”

“Yes to the music, no to the wine,” I said.  “The latter is not necessary.  Watch.”  I held out my glass and a steward moved forward from where he hovered and refilled it.

He chuckled.  He was a pretty man, with dark black hair that matched his tilted, amused eyes.  He had the handsomeness of youth, smooth skin and lips.  I drank from my wine and looked at him as he looked back at me.  The two of us stared at each other until the General said something from across the room and the other man suddenly dropped his eyes.

“I am reminded of my rudeness,” he said.  “But I thought perhaps where you come from, eye to eye contact is not the same as it is here?”

“It’s not,” I said.  “I find it unsettling that no one will look me in the face, to tell the truth.”

He smiled, and his gaze slipped across my face before returning to the carpet.  “I am called Jorie, Victoria.”

“Jorie,” I said.

“Ah, never has it sounded as sweet as on your lips,” he said, and looked surprised when I laughed at him, then laughed as well.

“Yes, I suppose that sounded foolish,” he said.

“I’m not a thirteen year old to fall for that sort of flower,” I said.  “Speaking of which, your partner over there is trying to catch your attention.”

He kept his back turned to the young girl he had been dancing with, his eyes moving from thing to thing, touching my face for the briefest of moments on each pass, before it slipped away to the carpet, the punch bowl on the table, the wide windows that showed the swirl of snow past the darkness outside.  She was thin and pale, dark-haired.  She bit her lip as she saw me looking at her and turned to speak to her companion.

“Go pay her a little attention,” I said.  I let my eyes touch his chest, his neck, his cheeks, before I dropped my voice.  “Then come back to me and speak more extravagance.”

A spark of silent delight touched his eyes before he turned to do my bidding.  I smiled to myself and watched the room.

The bell rang, and the General offered me his arm to take me into dinner.  To my disappointment, I was flanked by the General and Avi.  Jorie was some twenty people down the vast wooden table from me.

The table was littered with slaughtered animals, like the gustatory aftermath of some woodland battle.  Most of the animals had six limbs; their mouths were invariably stretched around pieces of fruit that had been roasted.

I ate sparingly for the most part, but found a cheese and smoked fish dish that I liked.

“Ah, that’s one of my favorites,” Avi said, helping himself and me. “My mother used to make it on my birthday, because I loved it so.  It’s called Rimmoah.  It looks as though they made this just for you, but we will share it.”

There was a smokey tang and richness to the dish that I relished.  I ate, listening to the General to my right, discoursing on a battle with the hill tribes.

“They left decent civilization behind a century and a half ago,” the other man said.  “They deserve no consideration, but you act as though they had equal diplomatic weight as real countries and intercede on their behalf, making peace between them.”

“Their councils are invariably naïve,” the General said.  “We do them a kindness by offering them shelter.  And as they deal with us more and more, they will take on our customs and be assimilated.”

“If they do not end up influencing us,” the man grumbled. “My daughter studies with a tribesman’s daughter in her schooling, and comes home with strange ideas.”

“You will be speaking before the Mayor and the Council,” Avi said in my ear.

I nodded irritably, wanting to hear more of what the General was saying. “Yes, yes, I know.”  I tried to turn my attention back, but Avi pulled at my arm.

“Don’t…feel…well,” he gasped, breathing hard.  His breath smelled like cheese and rotten peaches.  Two servants hurried over just in time to catch him as he writhed backward, falling off the upholstered, high-backed chair.  His groans echoed across the room over the clatter of dishes.

A servant knelt beside him even as one of the other guests hurried over, fumbling with the pouches at his belt.

“What has he eaten?” he said, looking up from Avi’s agonized face.

“Mainly that,” I said, and pointed at the cheese and fish just as the first convulsion of pain hit my stomach.  The room whirled in dizzy waves and I tried to break my fall to the room with my arms but failed.

—

How much later it was when I awoke, I didn’t know.  There was sunlight shining in the window – late morning?  As I stirred, a chime sounded.  Seconds later, Stentor entered.  He helped me sit up, and brought me a mug of steaming, licorice-smelling tea.

“What happened?  How long have I been sick?” I asked.

“Two days,” he said. “The doctors have been to see you several times.  They said that if you made it through last night you would probably live.”

“What about Avi?”

“He didn’t make it.”

“Do they know who did it?”

“Someone in the kitchens. They’re still investigating, but the woman committed suicide in her cell. Some disgruntled servant, perhaps, with an imagined wrong.”

“Is this common, people being poisoned?” It would have been nice if that had been mentioned in the datasheet.

“Sometimes people kill other people. This is an unfortunate, human thing. When we catch them, we punish them. Do you not have murders, in your advanced society?”

I looked at him.  Purple tiredness bloomed underneath his sagging eyes.  “You’ve been up all night.”

“Two days running,” he admitted.

I was touched. “Thank you.”

He shrugged.  “The doctors said you should rest this afternoon, but that (again, if you should live), you should be ready to give your presentation within three days.  They have suggested that you spend the first two of those days in bed.”

I leaned back in bed, tired by the effort of talking.  “All right.  But bring me my datapad for when I wake again.”

He nodded and complied, then went off to catch his own rest.

Jorie visited the next day and sat beside my bed, talking nonsense to me.  Stentor hovered as a disapproving chaperone, ostensibly reading from the small book that he carried in his vest pocket.

Jorie had been in two skirmishes against the bandits. That was the sole of his military experience so far, he said.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“I believe the equivalent in old Earth years is twenty-three,” he said.

“You looked it up?”
 He blushed.  “I was working at my desk and wondered.”

“That’s sweet,” I said.  Stentor cleared his throat and turned a page.

“How old are you?” Jorie said.

“I would be sixty-three now,” I said, “but my physical development was halted at thirty-eight, which was when they snipped me.”

“Snipped you?”

“Took me from my timeline.”

There was a knock from downstairs.  Stentor went to answer it, and Jorie took advantage of the opportunity to take my hand and press a kiss on the knuckles.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” he said.

I felt pleasant warmth throughout my body and smiled at him.  He released my hand as Stentor came through the door flanked by two doctors.

“You’ll have to be on your way,” Stentor informed Jorie, and Jorie nodded.

“I’ll see you again soon, I’m sure, Victoria,” he said, and exited.

The doctors listened to my lungs, my guts, flexed my elbows and palpated my chest, throat and ears before pronouncing me fit enough to rest for another day.

—

I’d hoped for Jorie again the next day, but instead I had someone almost as interesting: Dame Ilias.  She came bearing a huge basket of spiced nuts and dried fruit and trailed by several younger woman.  Stentor dragged chairs in from the parlor and they settled to embroider while the Dame talked to me.

“You seem to be much recovered,” Ilias said as I helped myself to a handful of the nuts.  They were covered in some sort of spicy, sweet crystals, like pepper and honey mingled.  “Stentor, perhaps you will go and fix us all hot klah?  It is chilly outside and the girls had thin cloaks.”

 

“I am feeling much better,” I said as he bowed and left.  “I don’t remember much of the night, though.”

She shrugged, flicking a hand in a dismissive gesture.  “Chaos and shouting.  You are better off without the memories.”

“I don’t like gaps,” I said.

She paused for a moment before speaking. “Are there other gaps you object to?”

“It seems as though the first fifty years of this planet’s history are gaps,” I said.

She glanced over at the two girls.  Without speaking they both went to the door and knelt beside it, listening for Stentor’s return.

Ilias’s voice was low and urgent. “You do not know about the council that was overthrown?”

I shook my head.

“I thought you did,” Ilias said.  “I thought you knew what had been done and were coming to help them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When we first came to this planet, we did not have harems or customs for ‘decent’ women to follow,” Ilias said. “The council was, in fact, through accident more than anything else, mainly women.  We were not a society that ruled things out for one gender or another at that time.  The council wanted peace for all the settlements overall, but they had children who were merchants and who preferred war because of the profits that might be made.  They overthrew the council and set laws and traditions in place so women could no longer come to power, lest they speak of peace.  Every woman was subjugated, forced to act as the slave of the men who had overthrown them, each one bowing down to her son, and the men who had served on the council were set to death for acting against the newly created ‘tradition’.”

There was bitterness in her tone.

“And that’s how it’s been for a hundred and fifty years?  Haven’t you tried to rebel?”

“Rebel?  Many times.  Each times the ringleaders are killed.  But we keep trying.  We resist where we can.”

“Like killing the bearers of new technology. You poisoned me.”

“What would you do in my place?” she said.  “We have so little we can do.  We live in our poetry, our literature, trying to shape a revolution in couplets and tapestry needles.  Even in your benighted time, you were not as wretched as we are.”

Silence stretched between us.

“I don’t think I can help much,” I said.  “Perhaps smuggle a few women off planet.”

She shook her head. “We will not leave our world.  We will change it back to what it once was.”

The girls stood, moving back to their places just before Stentor entered with a tray of cups and a steaming pitcher.  He sat and read while we spoke of inconsequential things: the best treatment for headache, and the best kinds of fish for this season.

When they left, I said to Stentor, “What is the little book that you read from?”

“It is poetry that my mother’s mother wrote,” he said.  He held it out to me and I leafed through it, looking at the spiky, alien script.

“Will you read one to me?”

He shook his head.  “Some things are private.”  Taking the book back, he gathered the empty cups and pitcher and withdrew.

—

I was furious to find that my clothing was gone and that I would have to wear one of the dresses for the presentation.  Stentor claimed not to know where the jumpsuit had been sent to clean it, but promised to have it found for me by the time I got back.

I dressed in the brown.  I hated it.  It reminded me of the dresses of my time, the absurdity of bustle and corset, and thick heavy fabric on hot New York days, so stifling that women learned the art of swooning so when they were felled by their garments they would land gracefully.  The boots were heavy but warm, heeled awkwardly.

I tottered on them in front of their eyes, explaining the advantages of the Institute.  How our technology would allow them to harvest the best minds of their past, bring them forward to enrich their culture.

They exchanged glances.  “How much would it cost to bring a group forward from a century and a half ago?”

“An experienced agent could do it, depending on the size of the group, in a week or two,” I said.  “If you want to train your own people – which is the package we recommend to our customers – it will take them a week or so to get up to speed on the technical maneuvering necessary for timesnipping.”

“So for a group of eight, a week,” one of them said.  He was an unpleasantly oleaginous man, his black hair worn in an elaborate, fussy style.  “And another week for their women.”

“Their women?” the General said.

“They’ll need the cores of their harems if they’re to function as part of our social system.”

“But wouldn’t that be dangerous?” another said.  They started to lean together and argue but the General and the Mayor made gestures for silence before the General turned to me.

“Madam, I have arranged for company for you, while we discuss our questions and what we would like to do.”  He ushered me into a small antechamber, where Jorie sat waiting with khav and sweet biscuits.

The two of us curled together.  “They’ll take hours,” Jorie whispered into my ear.  He kissed me, fumbling with the laces at my neck.

—

Afterwards, we drank the cooling khav and ate the biscuits.

“Do you have a harem?” I asked Jorie.

“You cannot be a functioning member of society without one,” he said.  “Without it, you are haraf, a motherless man.  The harafs serve as soldiers in the wars.”

“Is your harem very large?”

“It is only one woman right now,” he admitted.  “Leandra.  You would like her, I think.  I would like you to meet.  She would like you as well.  You are of the same age.”

“She’s thirty-five?” I said, surprised.

“Older,” he said.  “But you remind me of her, or perhaps the other way around.”

“I’m complimented, I think.”

The General knocked at the door.  At my invitation, he opened it and looked inside.

“We wish to debate another night,” he said to me. “You may as well return to your lodgings and rest.  In the morning, I think we will have a substantial contract for you.”

“Perhaps Jorie might see me home,” I said.

The General shook his head. “No, it would not be seemly.  I will take you in my car.”

Despite my disappointment, I appreciated the car’s luxury.

“Please thank Ilias for her kindness during my illness,” I said to the General.

He turned his attention back from the slick streets outside.  “Ah, she has always been very kind.  Did she bring you her fish tea?  That always made me better when I was a child.”

“You knew your wife when you were a child?”

“She was my mother then.”

I blinked, agape.

“You have not done your homework,” he said.  “Our social structure is unique, I admit.  I would have thought you would know.”

“I focused on the trade and history,” I said.

“Our harems have cores, which are our mothers.  Only the oldest son may go on in that way; the rest are haraf.”

The air in the car felt stifling, and my stomach roiled as though the poison had been stirred up again.

“I’m sorry, I don’t feel well,” I said.

He patted my hand.  “I understand.  Sleep until we get there, if you prefer.”

I leaned my forehead against the cold glass of the window and closed my eyes, my thoughts a dizzy whirl. The women, overthrown.  Each son reasonable for his mother’s subjugation. Taking her into his harem – surely a position in name alone? Mothers, watching the next generation of leaders, knowing themselves helpless in the harem, the only space left to them.  What would it be like, bearing a son here and knowing that he would be your eventual master?

—

I did not see Ilias again until the morning of my departure.  She came into the room and I sent Stentor for hot klah for the two of us.  That gave me enough time to give her the sample time belt from my kit, and tell her the basics of its use.

“You’ll want to take the council members unobtrusively.  The originals will stay in the time line, but you’ll have the copies,” I said.  “And at some point you’ll have to tell them that they have counterparts, living in their sons’ harems.  I don’t know how they’ll react to that.  But if anyone can help you plot a rebellion, they can.”

Her eyes were dark with tears.  “Thank you.”

She hid the belt away before Stentor returned.  We drank the klah together and she gave me the present she had brought: an intricate tapestry of rawrs, dancing or fighting, I couldn’t tell which.

“That reminds me of one of my grandmother’s poems,” Stentor said from where he sat.  He opened the pages and read.

“Monsters hatched within our breasts,

Twine and tangle, rawrs devouring each other’s hearts,

Before turning to tear our own.”

He closed the book.

“Gruesome,” I said.  I touched the rough wool of the tapestry, brushing my fingers over brown and black and shaggy cream strands.  I lifted my cup to Ilias.

“May you live in interesting times,” I said to her.  “May you live in times as tumultuous as my own.”