Chapter 2
Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain
And the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain.
Oklahoma, Ev'ry night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk
Makin' lazy circles in the sky.
- The Company (Oklahoma)
=/\=
On another ship – which was actually not that far away – a man sat in a small rectory which doubled as an office. He was late middle-aged and was wearing the red robes of his order, for the ship was home to a monastery. The name of the ship, and the order to which he belonged had the same name – Eligius.
The brothers – well, most of them, at any rate – made wine when they weren't engaged in prayer or tending to the needs of the ship or attending to the basic necessities of life. The order was small and somewhat fanatical, having as one of its basic tenets the express requirement that its members never touch a woman, not even by accident.
Eligius was the patron saint of knife makers, minting, numismatics, agricultural workers, blacksmiths, boilermakers, cab drivers, carriage makers, cartwrights, coin collectors, crafters, cutlers, farmers, farriers, garage workers, gas station workers, gilders, goldsmiths, harness makers, horses, horseshoe makers, jewelers, jockeys, laborers, locksmiths, metal workers, miners, saddlers, veterinarians and wheelwrights.
And clock makers and watch makers.
This man, in his former life outside of the monastery, had been a philanthropist named Milton Walker. He had had a wife, Enid, and a daughter, Helen. But things had not gone well in his marriage, and so he and Enid had divorced. As for Helen, that had occurred while she had been in Medical School on Nereid. She had always been Daddy's Little Girl, and the divorce only served to strengthen that bond.
But there was one area where they differed. Both of them had come to see the past as inefficient, unfair, and often downright cruel. Milton had fallen in with a secret faction known as the Perfectionists, and had risen through its shadowy ranks to become that group's leader.
To him, changing time was all about improving humanity. He was tired of living in the present time, with its restrictions, and longed for a utopia. After all, there were still wars and diseases, there was still some poverty and oppression, and discomforts remained. He felt he had been given a sacred trust, to root out imperfection at its core, and make the present and, by extension, the future, better by tweaking and jiggering the past.
For Helen, there was but one motivation that accompanied altering timelines, and it had naught to do with any cause, noble or otherwise. For her, it was a lark, and the human past was her ultimate playground.
All she really wanted to do was see just what she could get away with.
=/\=
The Perfectionists had put their thumbs on several metaphorical temporal scales. They had worked to prevent a plane crash in 1959. They had sought to prolong Prague Spring, which was supposed to end in 1968. Along the way, they had greatly diminished the AIDS epidemic as well.
But every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and a lot of negatives had arrived, hand in hand with the positives. Overpopulation and later development of Warp Drive were but a pair of the unintended negative consequences of the Perfectionists' meddling.
And so Rick Daniels – and his fellow temporal operatives, Thomas Grant, HD Avery, Polly Porter and Sheilagh Bernstein – had had to put everything back. And so a person would die who had lived. Or another negative – imperfect – result would return to history. For the Temporal Integrity Commission's mission was not to make time better. It was to put time back.
And sometimes the original history was messy, inconvenient, and unjust or simply downright mean.
It could be a hard life, and it would sometimes jade a person. Rick had been putting back nasty timelines for so long that he had taken to finding comfort in the arms of the women he encountered along the way. It was a temporary escape from what could often be painful consequences. A kiss – and more – from a1699 Quaker widow or a Chief Engineer from 2380 or a 1417 actress could make it all go away.
At least, it had.
But then he had met Milena Chelenska, she of the Prague Spring that had threatened to overstay its welcome. And while he was uncertain of his feelings, he knew that they went deeper than what he had experienced with a 1929 flapper or a 2763 first assistant to Future Guy named Phillipa Green.
But all of it was impossible, anyway. The timeline would not allow for anything beyond fleeting togetherness. And so the thought of Milena began to fill him with melancholy. The only other person who had ever given him that feeling for a significant period of time was also someone he had never actually met, and could never meet – Jun Sato.
All of those conquests, and someone was bound to turn up pregnant. The fact that that person was the Empress Hoshi Sato, from the other side of the pond – the mirror universe – just made matters all the trickier.
She had had the baby and named him Jun. It meant truthful – an utter absurdity, considering all of the lies that were to come, in order to assure that Jun could live at all.
The mirror government had demanded that the pregnancy be reversed, and that it never happen. But this was an innocent child's life. Rick didn't ask for much, but he did want Jun to live, so he had his boss, Admiral Carmen Calavicci, help him intervene.
First they conceded to have the boy sterilized, and then they conceded to allow him and Hoshi to believe that Rick had died. And, finally, Rick was forbidden from ever returning to the mirror during the Empress Hoshi's entire lifetime – even the moments of her birth and her death. It didn't matter to the mirror government. They thought their draconian requirements were downright liberal and kind.
=/\=
On the USS Saint Eligius, a call came in. The caller's identity and gender were masked – a convenient bit of technology for an organization as secret as the Perfectionists. Milton Walker answered it as he sat in the rectory. "You're just about ready to go?" he asked.
"I am," replied the caller, "I swallowed the dose of trichronium about twenty minutes ago."
"Very well," said Walker. Trichronium was an enzyme that had been developed in conjunction with a drive which was small enough to be worn on one's wrist. The drive superficially resembled Eleanor Daniels's ancient cuff bracelet. Trichronium, in tandem with Milton Walker's cuff, was designed to be a nearly perfectly untraceable component of time travel.
The subject would swallow a dose of trichronium, Milton Walker would adjust the settings on his cuff – which he wore all the time – and the subject would be nearly instantaneously whisked away to the time and place of Walker's choosing. Once the trichronium wore off, the subject would be just as abruptly returned, so the Perfectionists' temporal operatives always carried an extra dose with them, in case their missions took longer than expected.
Missions had to be approved by Walker, and he had some rather quirkily specific ideas about the changes he wanted to be made. First, he only cared about humans, and only wanted any changes made for any other species to work to the benefit of humankind.
Plus, he mainly only cared about the twenty-one centimeter radiation band universe. He didn't know about Jun Sato's sire, nor about Rick being banned from visiting such a large chunk of mirror history. But that hardly mattered. Those were not the fish he was interested in frying.
In addition, he confined his attentions to a rather narrow slot in history – from the October fourth, 1957 launch of Sputnik to the April fifth, 2063 launch of the first Warp One vessel, the Phoenix. That time period was dense with what were referred to as pariotric events. That is, they were decision points in time where a choice made, one way or another, had enough of a significant impact to matter, but was not such an enormous change that it would be impossible for a human to precipitate it.
Temporal decision nodes could be tiny and, essentially, meaningless. Those were called otric. Or they could be megaotric, e. g. too big for humans to have any sort of an impact. But pariotric events or nodes, much like Goldilocks, were just right.
Walker set the cuff's controls to just before an event that threatened to be so large that it could, potentially, tip into megaotric territory. Certainly the impact of the change would ripple down through time. The controls were set for April sixteenth, 1995.
Oklahoma City.
=/\=
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say
Yeeow! Ayipioeeay!
We're only sayin'
You're doin' fine, Oklahoma!
Oklahoma O.K.
- The Company (Oklahoma)