Never Love A Stranger Part 27

"You can't," the woman said in a clipped tone. "You will simply have to live with the errors you have made, just as all of us must."

James dropped Annie's hand abruptly and leaped to his feet, facing his erstwhile mistress. His face twisted with anger. "I cannot accept that," he said sharply. "I cannot. Fifty million of my people died because of me. I refuse to accept it as unalterable truth. I will find a way to change history, or die trying."

Chapter 22.

While James and Gar leaned over a computer screen, intent on the scenes it flashed, Annie sat uncomfortably in her chair, gazing at the lovely view. She was aware of the older woman, staring at her, and at last she turned and gave the woman a cold look.

"Do I look that strange to you'"

The woman blinked, then her mouth turned up in a wry, icy smile.

"Actually, you look precisely like one of us. That is the reason I am surprised."

"I am just as human as you are," Annie said irritably.

"I hardly think so. You come from the time of the Plagues, a time when humans died in great numbers,

when humans'" She shuddered. "Killed each other."

"The Plagues'" Annie repeated, wondering if the woman thought she was from the Dark Ages.

The woman shrugged. "So many of you died of various infectious diseases."

"Like AIDS'"

"AIDS, SARS, various cancers ' So many people died that some of the cities were left virtually

abandoned."

"Is that when people started living underground'"

The woman shrugged. "The shift to underground living happened over many decades. The first country

to move underground was j.a.pan. Living on a tiny island as they did, they were running out of land rapidly. They built underground cities, and within twenty years most of the populace had left the dying above ground cities. The rest of the world began to follow. Within a century virtually everyone lived below ground."

"Except you'" Annie said.

The woman frowned. "I don't understand."

Annie turned her head and waved at the window. "Obviously you don't' you don't'"

She stammered to a halt as the view out the huge window changed abruptly, showing a pristine ocean, sawgra.s.s waving in the breeze, breakers crashing against a white, sandy beach. Seagulls whirled, and big brown pelicans flew low across the water, their huge wings flapping in a ponderous rhythm.

Annie immediately felt incredibly stupid. Like a barbarian, in fact. "It's just a video," she said. It was a h.e.l.l of a video, perfectly clear and entirely convincing, but it obviously wasn't real.

"It's a real-time holovideo, to be precise," the woman said. "People need to see the outdoors. Some few even feel the need to go outdoors, although most of us are happy simply viewing nature from a distance. This way, the Earth stays clean, the wildlife remains undisturbed, but we can still admire our world. It's the perfect solution."

It sounded horrible to Annie, although she figured it would be tactless to say so. "You have cameras outside'"

The woman nodded. "Very small and in.o.btrusive cameras, disguised so they look entirely natural. I doubt there is a place on the surface you can go without surveillance."

"That's too bad," Annie said.

The woman's white eyebrows shot up to her hairline. "You were planning on going outside'"

The shock in her voice made it clear that going outside was considered, if not entirely bizarre, at least extremely peculiar. "It seems like the best place to go," Annie admitted.

James glanced back over his shoulder, and Annie realized he'd been listening. She was surprised, having thought he was entirely engrossed in viewing the video on the computer monitor. But then, he was almost certainly capable of doing two things at once.

"The outside here is extremely dangerous," he said. "There are a great many predators."

If the surface had been entirely undisturbed for a century or more, that made a lot of sense. Annie bit her lip, thinking of wolves, cougars, and bears. And that was a.s.suming this was North America. There were even more dangerous predators on other continents. They could easily run into a pride of lions, or a Siberian tiger. "Wild animals usually avoid humans," she said at last.

"Most animals on the surface have never seen humans. We cannot a.s.sume they will fear us. They may regard us as a very appetizing dinner. Of course, they would be wrong in my case. But not in yours."

Annie nodded, realizing he was right. There was another concern as well. For all she knew they were in'or under'Alaska, or someplace equally inhospitable. They could be underneath Antarctica for all she knew. James was right--venturing out on the surface would be very foolhardy. Yet the alternative might be worse. "But we're not safe here, either. Is there anyplace we can go'"

James shook his head. "Every underground compartment is connected by the Gates."

"Those elevator thingies'"

"They are actually spatial distortions," the older woman said.

Annie looked back at her, remembering the woman was a scientist. "Spatial distortions'"

The woman sighed, as if she were an idiot. Maybe she was an idiot, here. "Do you know what a spatial distortion is'"

Annie thought frantically. It sounded like something from Star Trek. Or Einstein. Unfortunately, what she knew about Einstein's theories could be written on a postage stamp with room left to spare. "Uh, not exactly."

"s.p.a.ce can be curved by a small, dense ma.s.s, effectively connecting two different places in s.p.a.ce-time," the other woman said in a pedantic, high-school science teacher sort of voice. "Once we realized how simple it was to curve s.p.a.ce, it was an easy matter to utilize distortions in order to connect s.p.a.ces."

Annie swallowed, realizing they were discussing the eerie swirling s.p.a.ce James had convinced her to step into. Despite herself, she was impressed by the knowledge that these people could actually twist s.p.a.ce somehow in order to move quickly across long distances. But the phenomenon still creeped her out. "Can't you people just use trains'"

"When the first underground cities were built, people did in fact use maglev trains in depressurized tunnels, or high-speed elevators, to get from place to place. But our method of travel can get a person from Tokyo to Mexico City in much less than a second."

"I can see how that would be handy," Annie admitted.

"People no longer think of themselves as bound to any particular land ma.s.s. We are one society now, not necessarily any closer to the people beyond that wall'" she pointed "'than we are to people living in Antarctica."

"James said that you don't gather into groups."

"That's right. We very rarely leave our homes. There is significantly less chance of infection if families keep mostly to themselves. At any rate, we have virtually everything we need in our homes. We have no reason to expose ourselves to large groups."

"You had everything you needed," Annie said, looking back at James, "because you had humanoids to do all your work for you."

The woman snorted. "You think we let our robots do everything for us' We kept robots to do insignificant, tedious jobs so that we could focus on what was important. Art, science, music ' we have made great strides in many fields in the past century."

"Because you had slaves to do the grub work."

The woman snorted. "There is no point in trying to reason with you," she said irritably.

"Probably not." Annie stood up and walked toward James and Gar, who were watching what looked like a news broadcast from her time. She was surprised to see Susan Takahashi talking. She leaned over James' shoulder. "What are you watching'"

"We've found something," James said.

"If it has something to do with Susan Takahashi, I don't like it."

"I think you will like this," James said. "This is an interview with Kay."

Annie put her hand on his shoulder and leaned forward, seeing Kay's laughing dark eyes as she talked

with Susan. "She looks older," she said in surprise, noticing streaks of gray in Kay's hair that hadn't

been there before.

"She is in fact older. This interview was done about five years after the date I remember seeing you first listed in the records as Clark's mother."

"Which means'." Annie trailed off, barely daring to hope.

"Which means that we did in fact change history, somehow. Kay did not die, and you did not become Clark's mother. At least not at the time you should have."

Annie let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. "That's terrific," she said softly.

"It is horrible!" the old woman said in a strident tone. "If you changed history, G.o.d only knows what

might have been altered."

"Fortunately you will not be aware of it," James answered.

"How can you be aware of it, if she's not'" Annie asked. "I mean, if things changed, how can you

remember them differently'"

James shrugged. "When one travels in time, one steps outside the flow of time. I do not remember the changes because they did not occur in my past. But the changes are an integral part of her past'" He

nodded toward the older woman'"so this reality appears to her to be the only one she has ever known.

In fact, it is the only reality she has ever known."

"I hate time travel," Annie muttered.

"The question is," Gar said, "what did you do to change history'"

"The night of the fire," Annie hazarded. "Kay loved children. If James hadn't been there, I bet she would

have gone back into the building to rescue that baby. I bet she would have been killed in the fire."

"An interesting hypothesis," James said. "But I am honestly not certain that it matters that much what we

did to change the past. A better question is, what did the changes do besides save your friend' Did they have any impact on this time'"

"Still," Annie said. "Go back and look at the night of the fire. See if you can find any clues there."

"If the fire truly was the pivotal moment in history," James said, "then it was an accident, and Dekka did

not set it."

"How do you figure'" Annie asked.

"Paradox," Gar answered as his fingers moved over the keyboard. "If it had already happened in the past and your friend had died before James went back, Dekka couldn't have set it. It must have been an accident. A coincidence." His fingers paused, and the screen showed James talking to Susan. Annie remembered the conversation clearly.

"Let me remind you that no one else did," Susan said on the screen. "You did."