This is the second installment of my serialized free story,
Out of Time. The first installment is
here.
10 Downing Street
10 January 1806
“You knew, sir! You knew!”
William Pitt was red-faced, and probably not from anger
alone. Mary figured he’d already consumed a bottle of port, and it was eleven o’clock
in the morning. Pitt the Younger’s fondness for the wine was well known to his
contemporaries as well as later historians; his death in 1806 (in another
thirteen days, if the timeline held, and there was no reason to assume it
would) was generally assumed by historians to have been hastened by
over consumption. Nineteenth century wine and liquor bottles were smaller than
those of the twenty-first, but even so—Regency gentlemen drank a hell of a lot.
And most of the gentlemen currently serving in His Majesty’s
government had been drinking even more since Mary, Group Captain Hullin, and
their 7.8 million fellow temporal exiles had shown up.
She hated “temporal exile,” but the geeks from GCQH had
coined the phrase and it stuck.
They were down to less than 4 million.
“Mr. Pitt, please, if you’ll allow me to--”
Captain Hullin broke off and Mary flinched as Mr. Pitt
continued to pound the table between them, a gorgeous, though scarred, gouged
and generally dilapidated, example of the Chippendale style. She still wasn’t
used to treating antiques as normal furniture.
“You knew we would
lose our greatest champion, our most brilliant strategist, at this most crucial
and dangerous moment, and yet you chose not to warn us!”
There were two other men in the room, members of the
minister’s staff whose names she hadn’t bothered to remember and who now stared
intently at Captain Hullin while their boss continued his tirade.
She was certain that if she opened the door, a large crowd
of eavesdroppers would fall, Marx Brothers style, into the small, stuffy room.
“You refused to share
vital information concerning the safety of this country, our country—and yours,
sir! Your country as well, or so you say, yet you--”
Oh, what the hell.
“It’s the Prince Regent, sir. The Prince Regent is the
problem. And the Butterfly Effect.”
The two men flanking Pitt started, like someone had pinched
them, and now they were staring at her instead of the Captain next to her. Pitt
had stopped midsentence to gape at her as well
There was silence in the antechamber on the other side of
the door; not the silence of an empty space, but the silence of a group of
people holding their breath.
Or maybe she was just imagining that part. She was operating
on very little sleep, and sitting across from three people who were determined
to pretend she didn’t exist was making her peevish.
Hullin turned to look at her in bemusement. “What the hell
are you doing?” he whispered.
“Sir, I assure you, we can hear you,” Pitt said.
Hullin took a deep breath, glanced at Mary once more, then
turned back to face the aggrieved PM.
“Mr. Pitt, I have no idea what Dr. Lilley is talk—excuse me,
that’s not precisely true, I do know what she’s talking about, but I have no
bloody idea why she’s bringing it up.”
Now it was Pitt who started, clearly surprised that Hullin
would use such language in the presence of a female.
Pitt wasn’t particularly comfortable around women, but that
wasn’t why he and his two inferiors had ignored her thus far. Even though
almost two years had passed since The Event, a lot of people—maybe most people,
and certainly most men—still couldn’t conceive of women possessing advanced
degrees and inhabiting the same professional spheres as men.
But as she was the only PhD temp ex on the British mainland whose
area of scholarship was 19th century European history in general, British
military history specifically, she’d become the de facto liaison between the military
personnel representing the temp exes and the men who
represented the Crown.
So she took a deep breath, pulled her chair up closer to the
table, tucked one leg under her to give herself some height, and leaned forward
across the table. Feeling the outer perimeter of his personal space being
invaded, Pitt stepped back and frowned, clearly disconcerted.
Which was just how she wanted him.
“Let’s start with the Butterfly Effect, shall we?”
Pitt looked like he was about to say something, so she just
kept talking, keeping her tone confident but conversational, neither aggressive
nor submissive. This was how she found
herself addressing all the contemporary men she dealt with, in order not to
challenge or provoke them while not allowing them to challenge or provoke her.
Rather like training dogs and horses, actually.
“It’s a theoretical device, and it describes how a hurricane
might or might not form, depending on whether or not a butterfly far away did or did not flap its wings. We use the term to describe the phenomenon
of very small, seemingly inconsequential actions or events which end up having
very profound or far-reaching effects.”
Pitt was still frowning but seemed calmer as he mused, “Ripples
in a stream. A pebble thrown into a lake
will generate ripples that constantly widen.”
She nodded with a smile. “Precisely so.”
Good boy!
“But what has this to do with…ah. I think I may see--”
And he probably did, because William Pitt was a
brilliant man.
“I’ll wager you do.” Wager
you do? She was beginning to speak like them even when she didn’t mean to. “We—and
by ‘we’ I mean all of us who came through in The Event—have generated a massive Butterfly Effect, quite without meaning to. We know this because the events
that have transpired since we arrived in 1804 have not followed the historical
timeline as we knew it in 2013.”
She paused while he considered this, resisting the urge to
ask, “Do you understand?” He would understand once he thought on it, and she of
all people had to be sensitive to the danger of condescending to contemporaries.
After a few beats, his face took on a quizzical cast. “Are
you saying that your presence has changed history?”
“History as we know it—yes. For instance, in our history the
King was still in his right mind in 1806; the Regency Act wasn’t passed until
1810. On the other hand, Napoleon hasn’t
yet gotten to Vienna, whereas in our time, he entered the city in November
1805. And Arth—that is, I mean-- I mean the point is, there are numerous other
examples as well.” She paused to take a deep breath, flustered and ever
conscious of Stephen Faraday’s warnings. “Now. We have to assume that it is our
presence that’s caused these changes to the timeline, yes? And if that’s the
case, we must try to limit our disruptions as much as possible, you see,
because…”
She paused again, trying to figure out how to say it. Finally she
gave up. Spreading her hands helplessly she said, “Look. The point is, we want
to try avoid screwing things up as much as we can. As we’ve told you, Britain
was victorious over Napoleon—but that’s not inevitable and even in our time, it
was a very close run thing.”
She glanced over to Captain Hullin, who’d raised an eyebrow
at her choice of phrasing. Having nearly blurted out Arthur Wellesley’s name,
she now couldn’t get him out of her mind.
Pitt was shaking his head. “I believe I understand what you’re
saying, but surely in the case of momentous events such as Trafalgar--”
“No, sir. No. Please, pardon my interruption, but…no. It’s
the momentous events that we feel are most particularly at risk of being
altered! Look. If we had told you that Admiral Nelson would die in battle on 21
October 1805, then obviously—surely—people
would have taken steps to avoid that, yes? Someone, somewhere, would have
sought to make sure Nelson wasn’t aboard Victory
that day, or that he didn’t order the maneuvers that he did, or…something like
that. And it’s impossible, absolutely impossible, to predict the multitude of
outcomes that could have resulted from any one of those alterations. Any of
them could have resulted in Britain losing the battle, but she didn't. She
won, and so Napoleon’s opportunity to invade is gone for good.”
He was pacing around the table now, stroking his chin. He
stopped a couple of chairs away from her and said, “But the threat is not
removed, he is still marching across Europe, and we must still confront him.”
Captain Hullin, clearly done with sitting on the sidelines,
stood up to face the prime minster. “Yes sir, exactly. And as Dr. Lilley has
explained, in order for that to happen—in order for Britain to finally prevail,
once and for all, over France--our experts believe very strongly that we must refrain
from telling you too much of what is coming. We’ve given you a general outline
of history as we know it, from your time to ours, but to ensure that this
history happens again, as it were, we must withhold a great deal of
information.”
Hullin was a man of impeccable breeding, well used
to formality, and so he didn’t have to try as hard as she did to speak in the
manner of contemporaries. It was clear from their earlier meetings with the
prime minister that Pitt respected Hullin, recognizing him as a gentleman.
As Tom Carr liked to say, “an aristo will always
recognize another aristo, even from two hundred years away.”
Pitt frowned once more, stared at the ground, and then looked
up with a sigh. “Very well. I accept your answer—for now. I do plan to discuss
the matter with my colleagues, possibly with some of our own scientists.”
Captain Hullin nodded with a slight bow.
“Now,” the prime minister continued. “To the Prince Regent.”
“Excuse me?” she and Hullin asked at the same time.
“Oh!” she exclaimed a second later. “I did mention him, didn’t
I?”
Pitt raised his eyebrows but didn’t respond.
“Hmm. Well, you see, we…”
Goddamn it. Why had
she blurted that out? What the hell was wrong with her? There was no way to…
“The Prince Regent cannot be told what we’ve discussed with
you today, or what we’ll discuss with you—and with your colleagues—in the
future,” Hullin said briskly. “I do apologize, and I know that this will cause
you some difficulty, but I’m afraid there really is no choice.”
“And for what reason am I to withhold such important
information from the Regent?”
“For the reason that, although he is a man of above average
intelligence, he is utterly lacking in judgment, discretion, discipline or
common sense. e HeH He cannot be
trusted.”
“Oh bloody hell!” exclaimed the prime minister.
But he didn’t argue.
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