A Question Of Time, Fred Saberhagen [best fiction books to read .TXT] 📗

with a deep breath. Smells strange and familiar at the same time, unknown since childhood, keyed into her memory.

      She said: “I could always remember this place—very much like this. Except now the house and everything seems so much smaller. But when I remembered these things I thought my memory was playing tricks on me. There were other things, too, that didn’t seem to fit. Cars, and radios, that I gradually realized looked like they were from the thirties. Old-fashioned clothes and toys. When things like that puzzled me, I always thought my memory was playing tricks.”

      She looked at her companion closely. “And there were even stranger things. Things that I saw you do, or seem to do, that would have been impossible for anyone.”

      “My dear…”

      Cathy indicated with a gesture that she had not finished. “Not only my memory,” she added. “People have been lying to me all my life. I didn’t know if this place was real. When I tried to talk about it, no one would pay attention. My mother abandoned me in an orphanage, you, my father, never tried to find me—did you?”

      “No,” the man said, after a silence. “because I came to realize that your mother was right to take you away from here.”

      “Why was she right?”

      “It was a dangerous place for you. I realize that now.”

      “Now you live here all alone?”

      Tyrrell looked faintly surprised. “Alone? No, far from alone.”

      The girl asked: “What year did she leave you?”

      “Who?”

      She stared at him. “My mother!”

      “Nineteen thirty-four.”

      “Nineteen thirty-four?” A moment of mental calculation. “That isn’t possible!”

      “Ah, but it is.”

      “No. It’s the time, you see—Father. You’re saying that Mother left you in nineteen thirty-four. But I’m only seventeen. How could I possibly be…?”

      “My whole life is a question of time, Cathy. Time does not run smoothly for me. Nor does it for anyone who lives in the Deep Canyon—as you did. It’s as if there were rapids in the flow. Like those in the river, you see—do you remember my showing you the river?”

      “I remember—the river. Yes!”

      “And I must have shown you the white rocks? The rocks as old as the earth, that make big rapids in the flow of time? I have spent my life at work upon those rocks—the spirit of the earth is in them.”

      Cathy cared little about rocks. “Father—it was Aunt Sarah, my grandaunt, who left you in nineteen thirty-four.”

      “It was Sarah, your mother, who left me—ah, I begin to understand.”

      “But—how could—”

      Tyrrell walked to the bedroom door. “Come here, girl. Let me show you something.”

      A minute later the two of them were in the room that had been briefly hers in her young childhood. Entering, the man touched a switch beside the door. A lamp came on.

      “I don’t remember there being an electric light.”

      “I put that in a few years after you were gone. There was some—trouble with the kerosene lamps.”

      Reaching into the closet, Tyrrell took down the stuffed animal and showed it to Cathy.

      “Do you remember this, daughter?”

      “Yes, yes!”

      “And this?” He set the childish lunch box in front of her. “I brought this down from the Rim, for you, at your special request. It was something you remembered from the world outside, before you came here. And you wanted one, I don’t know why.” He paused. “Perhaps you still had hopes of going to school one day. Well, I suppose you’ve managed to do that.”

      “Yes, I’ve gone to school. I don’t know either—Father—why I wanted the lunch box. But it seems to me I remember that I did.”

      “And this.” Now he was opening a very different metal box, also taken from the closet. “I believe your birth certificate is still in here somewhere.”

      In a moment he had brought out an old paper. The folds in the document were stiff with age.

      “Dated May eighteenth, you see, nineteen thirty. Your mother had it with her, for some reason, when she came here.”

      Cathy looked at the paper. “ ‘Catherine Ann Young,’ ” she read aloud, wonderingly.

      “That’s you. Sarah’s maiden name was Young. She was never married, you see, to your biological father. She must have loved him, of course, to have two children by him. Perhaps he was a married man. I never asked her much about her past. I was content to have her as she was.” He paused. “More than content.”

      “But I can’t believe this.” Cathy was shaking her head. “This would mean that there were years—decades, out of the middle of this century—when I didn’t exist at all.”

      “You might also reflect that you were also absent from existence during the entire nineteenth century—and for a good many centuries, millenia, geological ages, before that.”

      “Of course, but—it’s so strange.”

      “I doubt, my dear, that your life is any stranger than my own.” Tyrrell took thought, and hesitated. “Well, perhaps it is, in some details. But I also doubt that either yours or mine is the strangest human life than anyone has ever lived.” He smiled. “Of course, neither of us have quite run our full course yet, have we?”

* * *

      The birth certificate was marked by two tiny baby footprints in black ink, showing a left foot and a right.

      “Those prints would match yours,” said Tyrrell gently. “My dear, you were born more than sixty years ago. Evidently in California, as it says. Your mother can tell you the details, I’m sure.”

      “My mother. Then Sarah is my mother.”

      “Indeed she is. I’ll see that you get back to her safely.”      Cathy’s eyes closed as she stood over the little table, and for a moment she looked faint.

      Then she reached out, groped, for her father and gave him a tighter hug than before.

      Again he responded awkwardly.

      Releasing him, she looked around. “I wonder where Maria’s got to?”

      “I must go to the cave,” Tyrrell said suddenly, as if the question about Maria had reminded him of something. “It will be safer for you if you come with me, rather than waiting here.”

      “Safer?”

      “The Deep Canyon is a dangerous place to visit, girl. You have been lucky, so far. And when you were a