A matter of time

• • •

It was in Paris that they encountered and charmed the Americans. The people were even more naive and generous than their fool descendants.

The Atlantic storms were terrible during a December crossing. Their ship was a day late making New York.

"Damn, I wish they'd hurry," Fian growled from his place at the promenade rail. "I'm supposed to meet Handy today."

"Use the English, father," Fiala admonished remotely. She was captivated by the huge, rude new land rearing behind the piers, so different from the New York she had seen in her own time.

"Too slow, the strange tongue," said Fial. He still fought mal de mere. A nineteenth century steamer was a far cry from a twenty-first century SST.

Fiala regressed to German herself. "Look at them. Swarming like rats." Hundreds of men crowded the piers. Less than half appeared to be stevedores, or otherwise employed.

"Unemployment problem," Fial observed. "The country hasn't successfully changed over to a peacetime economy yet. Plus immigrants. Looks like we'll be able to go ashore in a few minutes."

Fiala rushed to be first.

Minutes later, "Top o' the morning to you, young miss."

Fiala turned.

The redhead, about twenty-five, cut her out of the mob with consummate skill, and established some proprietary right immediately acknowledged by his competitors.

"And won't you be needing someone to manage the plunder?"

She frowned in perplexity.

"Ah, me manners. O'Driscol. Patrick Michael himself… Ah, it's not me manners. Ya sweet thing, ya don't speak the language."

"I do. But do you?"

"Ah, she's got the tongue, don't she, Patrick Michael? Aye, it's the Queen's Own Anglish I'm talking. Her Majesty just hain't the proper use of it yet."

And thus O'Driscol drifted into their lives, initially as a porter helping with their baggage, and later as a guide. And later still, as a bodyguard when, quite unaware of what he had saved, he drove off three would-be robbers while Fian was carrying twenty thousand dollars.

One morning, a year later, they went to see Fial off to his new home in Rochester.

As the train pulled out, Fian asked, "Patrick, what's haunting you?"

The Irishman was forever looking over his shoulder and starting at the passage of unknown people. Hitherto, though, he had been completely uninformative about his past, except to proclaim that he came of the Kerry O'Driscols and not the Kilkenny, which made all the difference.

Patrick glared. Then grinned. "I'm an Irishman, ain't I?"

"That might be explanation enough to another Irishman. Maybe even to an Englishman. But we lesser races…"

"Ah, the Anglish. They'd know, yes, but they'd never understand. A stubborn, thick-headed race."

"So. Maybe you left home after some ill-starred attempt to educate them?"

"You know the Fenians, then?"

"No. But I understand the cantankerous nature of the human beast. You really think the Queen's men would chase you this far?"

"No. But there's them here what would be pleased to lay hands on the genuine Kerry O'Driscol. Them as put down the draft laws during the recent brouhaha with the South. And there's them from Washington City worried about what the Fenians might be planning for Canada, and them on the other side o' the law what feels O'Driscol owes them."

With those points as arguments, and Patrick's growing interest in Fiala to tilt the balance, Fian did not have a great deal of difficulty convincing O'Driscol that he should join their move west. The Irishman had lost virtually all taste for the life of a political activist.

It was a romantic era. With no State to demand her total devotion, Fiala enjoyed a postponed adolescence. Her life became a masquerade, she a tourist enjoying a foreign time. Even Fian succumbed, somewhat, to the Mardi Gras spirit.

Without duties or obligations, the soul was at liberty to chase butterflies of personal happiness.

Diversion was a necessity. Two centuries could make a long, boring walk home.

That making it was possible was beyond doubt. Fiala didn't abandon herself completely. She researched contemporary medicine with the same intensity given play. And she quickly developed substitute rejuvenation courses that would see them into a more medically enlightened age, where the real thing could be obtained.

Fial's job was to twist the tail of the tiger of capitalism till it yielded up enough danegeld to finance Fian in the creation of a primitive tachyon communicator. Fian was driven by a need to warn his future, or past, of Neulist's imbecilic actions.

"What I'm trying to do," he once told Fiala-she had just rendered a professional opinion, warning him that he had begun showing obsessive-compulsive tendencies-illustrating with a piece of string in which he had tied a loop, "is use the machine to snip out this backward loop, so, and have a straight line again."

"Too many paradoxes for me."

"Such as?"

"If you were going to be successful, we would've gotten the message already. We wouldn't be here now."

"Not necessarily. There's still a knot in the string. Anyway, without computers, all I have to go on is intuition. My feeling is that there's an oscillation. A duplication. Where it happens both ways. And going either way makes the other happen."

"Isaac Newton?"

"Or thermodynamics."

But Fian erred in his topological analogy, though he was on the right track. The string and loop were too linear. He should have been thinking of a Klein bottle, where the loop could go any of a thousand directions, inside and out, and still come back to the same starting point.