Chapter 3
He awoke at dawn with the tail of a nightmare sliding out of his mind. He retained a glimpse of strange trees dominated by monstrous beasts, their hulking bodies driving through lofty treetops on legs like cathedral buttresses. Their heads were modest lumps at the tips of necks of prodigious length that were counterweighted by craning tails. They smashed through the foliage with the inexorable directedness of locomotives, the jibs of their necks and tails curving and rearing in a slow dance of balancing . . .
The memory faded to leave a resonance of horror and the images and words with which he’d clothed the memory that gave the creatures a ghostly form posthumous to the living power of them.
Bel shuddered. He believed he had dreamed something as real and impossible as the Inferno globe. For a while he lay weakened in despondency, overwhelmed by the enormity of his aloneness and the hopelessness of undertaking any remedial action when the purpose, agent, means and place of his segregation were a mystery. But then with an angry upthrust he threw off his blanket and climbed to his feet. He breakfasted on salt pork and coffee while reading his Bible. He left the ‘wo-wo’ bird leftovers for lunch.
He had just finished rinsing coffee dregs from his cup when he grew aware of being watched, turned and saw a masculine figure standing at the edge of the trees. He arose from his crouch, looked at the musket, then stepped away from it. Dressed in blue jean workpants and a hooded jersey, the figure possessed a youthful slenderness. Bel began walking toward it. The figure mirrored him, leaving the trees. He observed a fluidity of movement he guessed was meant to display poetical refinement, but which looked affected in one wearing labourer’s garb.
But as they closed the sway of the figure’s gait grew ever more suggestive. A lilting motion up their body that culminated in a toss of the head as a hand flicked hair off their face was just too unmanly. Bel’s pace faltered to the feminine emergence from a masculine chrysalis.
Her pants were too small: they were sufficiently long to reach her odd multi-coloured shoes with pink laces, but were very tight — showing to advantage, in fact, the contours of her legs. Bel had never seen a woman’s legs before and it required stern self-control to elevate his eyes. At close range the charm of her features confirmed her gender. However she had a disconcertingly direct gaze.
They stopped several paces apart. She had a pale freckled face framed by black hair that fell to her shoulders. She was pretty but somehow strange. Fascinated, Bel sought to avoid uncouth staring and was aided in this by her eyes, which were large, dark and so frank in their evaluation that his gaze glanced off them. He’d never met a woman who looked so directly at a strange man. He wondered if she were one of those women the more worldly soldiers spoke of who behaved as a man.
“Hi. You speak English?” Her voice was husky.
He cleared his throat. “Private Belisarius Tuttle, ma’am, of the 53d New York Volunteer Infantry at your service.” This declaration accelerated as it proceeded to finish in a rush as he recognised its incongruity.
“Eh?” she said.
“Bel.” By thunder, it was hard to progress a conversation against that assertive and beautiful gaze! “My name is Bel Tuttle, ma’am.”
“Ah.” She advanced and thrust out her hand. “Izzie.”
The action was performed so naturally that he automatically took her hand — then froze, disconcerted to be shaking hands with a woman. She pumped his hand and returned it. He wondered if this were a man who behaved as a woman. His hand tingled, and he had to resist an urge to look at it. Then another matter took his attention.
“Excuse me, but I didn’t apprehend your name.”
“What? Oh. Izzie.”
“Izzie?”
“Short for Isabel. Isabel Askenas.”
Bel thought Isabel an agreeable name and wondered why she would demolish it to ‘Izzie’.
“Jesus, I’m glad to see you,” she told him. “You wouldn’t believe the people I’ve run into here.”
“What manner of folk were they?” In his confusion he took refuge behind a formal attentiveness.
“Well, there were these two warriors — I mean, like, really: swords and armour no less — Chinese, I think. And some guy from eighteenth century Europe.”
“A soldier?”
“No, civilian clothes, kind of scruffy. He wore a red cap which I think comes from the French Revolution. There were two women as well: an old dear from a hundred years back who charged up babbling in what sounded like Russian then ran off; and a chick from Asia somewhere, but way back, centuries ago, who had hardly any clothes on and looked good for only one thing.”
The girl spoke so fast Bel struggled to keep up. Words thronged out of her as if in a rush to get free before gagging. Nevertheless the recital, as hasted as it was, gave him time to regroup. He told her of the people he had met. “It’s strange the men are mostly soldiers, while the women . . .” He felt himself blush as she gave him a straight look.
“Don’t get any ideas, mate. Not every woman you meet on a strange world is easy.”
“Forgive me.” Was there no limit to her brashness? He rallied, harassed by a dark-eyed forensic scrutiny. “You seem well composed to life here. How long is it since you . . . arrived?”
“Day before yesterday. And don’t think I’m not freaked. It’s just that a life spent watching sci-fi movies sort of prepared me a bit. I get into this mode where it’s like I’m figuring out a movie plot.” She studied him. “You’ve no idea what I mean, do you?”
He felt dazed. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
She shook her head. “No, it’s me. I’m raving. I’m just so glad to find someone I can talk to.” She blinked, cursed, turned away, then burst into tears, putting her hands to her face. He looked at her heaving shoulders and wondered if he could offer assistance without causing offence. He lacked a handkerchief.
The sobs declined from convulsions to sniffles and she swiped at her eyes with the edges of rigidly extended hands. “Damn.” She rubbed her hands on her pants then raked them through her hair. Finally, she turned back to him. Her face was red.
“Sorry about that.”
“Pay it no mind, ma’am.”
“Look, do you mind not calling me ‘ma’am’?”
“I’m sorry, ma — . . .”
“Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
He thought of sharing his belief this was Purgatory but faltered before her dissecting gaze. “No.”
“What year was it when you left?”
“1863.”
“Jesus.” She favoured him with a look of incredulous irritation, then shook her head. “Sorry. Hearing that kind of brought it home. This is so weird. I mean, those people I saw could have been in a movie and I think my mind formed like a . . . a sanity buffer or something so I didn’t have to deal with it. Then you come along. You look pretty normal, like you’re a reenactor or something, but then you say ‘1863’. That’s too much. Do you know when I’m from?”
He shook his head.
“2024.”
He couldn’t grasp what she’d said. His face must have shown his bewilderment.
“You . . .” she pointed at him, “eighteen hundred and sixty-three. Me . . .” she pointed to herself, “two thousand and twenty-four.” She thought a moment. “That’s 161 years apart.”
Bel tried to comprehend. He thought, 161 years ago it was 1702 and my home was a wilderness inhabited by Iroquois Indians.
“Mind-boggling, eh.” She produced a strained smile. “No matter how many movies you’ve seen, there’s just no way of parsing that.”
A silence intervened that enabled Bel to grasp the reality of this confrontation. Until now it had been outside him, like a traveling show seen while passing on a train. Her eccentricity and profane breakneck speech had distanced him; she was a grotesque performance rather than a person. But now he heard her breathing, and a breeze brought the scent of her: clothes that smelled of some cloying chemical, and under a whiff of fresh sweat a body odour of such sweetness her skin was surely free of scurf and itches. Even his mother would be impressed by how often she must bathe.
“I heard a gunshot last night,” she said. “Was that you shooting dinner?”
“Yes. A large flightless bird.”
“You shot a dodo? Poor thing. No matter where they go they get slaughtered.”
“Dodo?”
“Yes. I saw a couple yesterday. They lived on an island off Africa but went extinct. Do you have leftovers? I’m vegetarian, but all I’ve had here are some plants I nibbled and hoped wouldn’t poison me. When I caught myself salivating over fish swimming innocently about, I knew I’d have to compromise my principles.”
Bel knew what ‘vegetarian’ meant, having read a newspaper article on the practice, and he invited her to his camp with the enthusiasm of one who to his surprise has something to offer. After exploratory nibbles she devoured with gusto dodo meat, pickles and coffee. During her repast the eclipse came. They exchanged a look and a half-laugh, acknowledging a shared acceptance of this new diurnal routine. Bel’s sense of her strangeness ebbed and he studied her in covert glances as he would anyone he’d just met.
While Izzie displayed little sense of feminine decorum Bel decided she lacked neither charm nor grace; she was just rather more forthright and dismissive of masculine authority than he was used to. He wondered if her behaviour arose from the bravado of fear. He knew soldiers who before a battle swaggered and roared the most tremendous oaths as they proclaimed how they would admonish the foe . . . then after the fight reverted to their normal quiet and humble selves.
“You’re pretty well equipped for this new life, aren’t you?” She nodded at his arrayed musket, clasp-knife, food, greatcoat and blanket. “And did I see a book there?”
He showed her his library.
“Hmm, the Bible and ornithology; riveting.”
He felt offended but concealed it, expecting little sympathy if he protested.
“I have to say you’re better off than me. All 160 years of human evolution have given me is this . . .” From a pocket she produced a flat black shiny object and handed it over.
He felt uncomfortable holding the thing; it gave no clues as to function. “What does it do?”
“It’s a smartphone. When it works it’s like a portable library, plus you can contact anyone anywhere almost instantly, read the news, find your way, and . . . oh, heaps more.”
Dubiously he turned it over. “All in here?”
“Well, not exactly. Do you know about radio?”
He humbly shook his head.
“Don’t feel bad; I don’t either. I’m not into technology, I just use it.” She took the device off him. “Someone wrote once that a truly advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. That’s how it is for me pretty much.”
Here at last was evidence of a feminine trait. Like any man Bel understood the machines in his world, whether guns, clocks, pumps, mills, wagons or steam engines. But the women he knew saw ignorance of such matters as a feminine virtue. He wondered what she meant by ‘technology’. She had said ‘movie’ and ‘vegetarian’ with a questioning inflexion, guessing he wouldn’t understand but in too much of a rush to explain. But she’d thrown this in without emphasis. He had a notion that a technology was a discourse on the mechanical arts.
“Why doesn’t this machine work here?”
She cleared her throat. “Um . . . oh, I know! Aether! You know what the aether is, right?”
He nodded.
“Well, it uses that, sort of. But it can only use the aether on Earth.”
She didn’t appear convinced by her own explanation and hurried on. “What were you doing — you know, before you left?”
“I was in a battle. A rank of soldiers was about to shoot me.”
“Strewth, that’s radical. Was this the American Civil War?”
“The war of the rebellion.”
“Your side won.” She paused as though expecting him to shout huzzah and throw his cap in the air. “What battle was it?”
“We were in Pennsylvania, near Emmitsburg.”
“The battle of Emmitsburg?” She frowned. “Can’t say I’ve heard of that one.”
Clearly, she knew little about the war of the rebellion if she was ignorant of its deciding battle. He felt offended by her breeziness. It screeched in discord with a calamity that burdened his heart, that was hardly yet a memory it was so proximate, and it felt insulting to Price and Asa and Colonel Farthing, all of whom he hoped to see at any moment, either as he awoke from a nightmare or because they too had been brought here at death.
She was looking at him expectantly and politeness prompted Bel to show interest. “What were you doing when you . . . left?” A thought occurred. “Did technology bring us here?”
“No idea. All I was doing was stepping off a sidewalk. My boyfriend’s house was across the street and I was about to pay him a visit. Then all of a sudden I was here.”
“Was this New York?”
“No, Christchurch . . . New Zealand.” She saw his puzzlement. “Pacific Ocean . . . Have you heard of Australia?”
He thought. “Prison colony?”
“Yes — no; it’s changed a bit. Anyway, that area.”
What did she mean by ‘boyfriend’? Bel wondered what women like her, intelligent and educated if maybe not of the best breeding, did with their lives.
“Are you attending a college?” he ventured.
“I was. Now I’m just mucking about. Dad calls me a loose unit — he makes it sound like a joke while conveying that it isn’t. I suppose I’m still a teenager is what it comes down to, though three twenty-something birthdays have regretfully come and gone. I’m not a good example to my younger sister. Luckily Faith is as straight as I am straying, so my parents can invest their hopes of social elevation in her.”
Bel felt as if he’d been struck on the head. Every explanation exhausted him with its frenetic delivery and alien content. He decided to focus on the present. “How have you contrived to sustain yourself?”
“Is that how people speak in your time? ‘Contrived to sustain yourself’. Like Jane Austen on steroids.” She took a breath and looked away. “Sorry. I get shitty under pressure.”
She had no sense of dignified reserve. Bel waited, embarrassed for her, and fascinated.
She resumed, not meeting his eyes. “That first day is a blur. I mean, I freaked. Big time. That fucking great moon or whatever it is — Jesus, it’s creepy. Not a good day at all. Then night fell and all I had was a phone, credit card and driver’s licence. I was exhausted but couldn’t bring myself to lie down for fear of what might crawl out at night. And that moon unveiling its horrors didn’t help. I woke up yesterday morning lying under a tree, so I must have just crashed.
“Anyway, I went exploring, meanwhile nibbling at plants like a rabbit. I found a sea. The water was full of fish. I don’t suppose you’ve a fishing line?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Damn, I’m glad I met you,” she said with gratifying sincerity. “Anyway, yesterday afternoon I found this . . .” she indicated the arch’s location.
“Do you know what it does?”
“No; advanced technology even for us. But I got excited at this evidence of civilisation and thought of waiting here like you did. But a downside to sci-fi movies is they don’t always give a positive view of advanced civilisations. So I moved off a kilometre; close enough to be handy if anything good arrived, but distant enough to be safe, hopefully, if anything nasty turned up. I heard your shot, but it was getting dark so I decided to wait until morning before checking it out.”
A pause came, during which he decided that her brisk profane volubility was her way of releasing tension while appearing in control, and also that she needed a respite from trying to decide what to do.
“I own that we should occupy ourselves to avoid unprofitable brooding.” He paused under the suspicion that her interested look had less to do with his meaning than his manner of delivering it. He realised Izzie was struggling to comprehend the reality of him as much as he was of hers. “I believe that our best plan is to catch a passel of fish. We can return here to salt some for rations, fix a meal and make camp.”
She grinned. “Suits me, boss.”
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What to make of her soldier? As they walked to the sea Izzie examined him in sidelong glances. It would be easy to say he resembled an extra from a historical movie but in fact there was something creepily authentic about him. That worn uniform and crazy kepi on his head, and most especially the sulphurous-smelling musket. But no, it wasn’t just his clothing and accoutrements that made him feel alien, as though he belonged to this world rather than Earth. It was something else.
She had often studied nineteenth century photographs of people, seeking something she couldn’t define, a secret of existence perhaps or a common humanity, but the people were so rigid and withheld, their faces set like masks. So what had they actually been like, those long-dead ancestors? Well now she had a living example.
He wasn’t a big man, little taller than her, and wiry. He had a square pleasant face that wouldn’t have attracted notice in twenty-first-century Christchurch and he spoke in a familiar American accent, rhotic and flat but with an English clip. However his hair was a mess; tangled by weeks of sleeps unfollowed by combings and by the depredations of his cap, which was evidently donned and pushed about on his head with no thought of the flattening, thicketting and startled erections that resulted. She caught glimpses of his world in his quaintly wordy speech and that bow he had given when inviting her to his camp, and more subtly, in his muscle tensions that she thought the opposite of modern: relaxed in his face and limbs, rigid down his spine.
The nonplussing effect he had on her confirmed an idea she held that time travel would not be as simple as portrayed in movies. You might speak the language of the historical community you visited, and dress the same, but your accent would be outlandish, your socialising crude and gender assumptions scandalous, and people would sense something wrong about you whatever you did, registering perhaps a kind of ghostly attendance: the press of an alien world behind you.
There was something about Bel Tuttle that made her edgy. Although she liked him, he was unsettling. He came from another world.
But now here he was. So was his Earth then the same Earth as hers or were they from different universes? It occurred to Izzie that since they were in a place where neither belonged they were also in a time where neither belonged. She had assumed it was 2024, only on another world, but Bel with equal justification could assume this was 1863. If they’d been shipped across the galaxy in hypersleep they would be in a future age, while if they’d arrived at “Beam me up, Scotty” speed, could time on one world be equated with time on another?
And what was time anyway? Fungus had delighted in disabusing her of conventional notions on the subject. On Earth it was perceived as an accumulation and measured by the arbitrary circumstances of planetary size and orbit and the history of its dominant species. But physicists exploring the foundation of existence were unsure if time even existed. Hence on this world — wherever and whenever it was — the fact of her and Bel Tuttle having been born 161 years apart was meaningless.
The simple truth was that Bel had saved her life. Confronted by a man from long ago who seemed so in command of their science fiction situation, and feeling the vulnerability of being at his mercy, Izzie had adopted a tough stance. She had advanced on him to deliver an executive handshake, rolling her hand to turn his hand palm-up in submission as seen on self-improvement channels, followed by a barrage of jargon and incisive questions to show the authority of the 161 years of social evolution she had over him. She had realised she was overdoing it when she noticed a wariness in Bel that she recognised from past encounters when she’d tried too hard to make an impression.
But there was no way she was going to admit how hapless she had been. It was one thing to talk blithely of being prepared by sci-fi movies, but after setting out to cross a street only to find herself between one step and the next being studied by a gang of hyenas on an alien world, the reality was that she had fainted. Awakening, she had wandered, lost but unseeking, her surroundings as immaterial as a sports video in a bar when she was sloshed. Her first attempt to get to grips with things had involved turned in circles trying to get her phone to work, jabbing and swiping at the thing like an idiot cleaning mechanism. Finally she had fallen to her knees in tears before curling up in a foetal lump of misery.
Nevertheless she had recovered. A realisation that night was approaching had worked as a purgative, emptying her of all but the need to act. For the first time she had taken in her surroundings. Seeing trees in the distance, she’d headed for them in search of shelter, and this directed action had produced a sense of accomplishment that made her feel more in control. The terror of that night had been exhausting — the hideous aerial dawn, then the wait in a blood-red twilight for something to kill her — but she had clung muttering to the edge of sanity.
Izzie had survived her second day by ceding control to her emotions. Experience had taught her that when she became emotional she made a fool of herself, so her habit was to calculate her way into things behind a prow of mordant wit. But now her thoughts were going in circles that threatened to spiral down in mad vortices to destruction. So she’d given up thinking in exchange for the emotional resonance of favourite sci-fi movies with happy endings and a fantasy of participation in TV reality shows which had buoyed her with dreams of rescue by superheroes or celebrities. She had talked as she wandered, playing the role of a show host praising how well this contestant was doing, just before the advent of the celebrity judges to a round of applause.
Perhaps her university-trained brain had been too abashed to challenge the fantasy that was keeping her sane and functioning, since the day had confirmed her brain’s utter incapacity when off-world. At least Bel had his weapons, food and blanket. She had nothing. When she had sighted the Chinese warriors and registered the constitutional lethal pride they possessed that no movie actor could have captured, Izzie had felt to a depth of her being she hadn’t known existed a plunging inadequacy.
She had found edible plants by a hazardous empirical method, and she could perhaps catch dodos and fish, they were so innocent, but she had no notion of how to light a fire let alone build a shelter. So her only hope of survival was to find a brute with a sword to protect her.
Faced therefore with starvation, sexual slavery or involuntary poisoning, Izzie had found Bel.
In the end they spent the day quietly, mostly by the sea. Neither was bold enough to wade beyond ankle depth let alone swim, but the water teemed with life and Bel caught a dozen trusting fish without even getting his toes wet, then salted some while Izzie gave a crash course in modern history. Afterward they returned to the arch of light, which offered whatever hope of rescue they had. Izzie had gathered plants that were presumably edible since she’d survived nibbling them the previous day and they shared a seafood salad before bedding down by the arch, Izzie wrapped in an American Civil War greatcoat, Bel in his blanket.
It helped that the day remained overcast and they saw nothing of celestial horrors.