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A Quiet Corner of Time
by Paula R. Stiles
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The following is an excerpt from A Quiet Corner of Time. For access to the entire story, sign in or create an account to purchase this issue. She heard a squeak like a curious mouse. Ah! What was that down in the left-hand corner? In the growing dusk, she'd almost missed it. She snuck along the wall and crouched down, pulling up a few dead notes advertising study nooks in Siberia and Alaska. A dark blue livenote glowed underneath, fluttering like a sleepy butterfly. Spooked by its sudden exposure, the livenote popped free of the board. Moira clapped her hands over it, falling over in the grass in her haste not to crush the little thing. She got to her knees. The livenote fluttered against her palms. She spoke to it soothingly and held still, trying to calm the tiny artificial intelligence in the adhesive band that divided it down the center into two wings. "Oh, I say! It's that young lady we saw on the caveman shoot last year." Startled, Moira looked up as a man and a woman, both blondes, came up the steps from the direction of the golf course by the beach. They looked vaguely familiar, though she couldn't place either of them. Bloody tourists. "May I help you?" Moira said through her teeth, as civilly as she could while trying to keep a livenote imprisoned between her hands without crushing it. She jerked her chin back in the direction of her office. "If you're lost, the hotels are all down there." "Oh, we've just been golfing," the man said—St. Andrews was noted for being the birthplace of golf. The man wore red tartan pants, an Argyll sweater and a tartan beret. "You'd best get back before your hotel's restaurant closes for dinner, then," Moira suggested, as a polite way to get them to shove off. The bearer of the tartan beret drew himself up and waggled his eyebrows. "They'll wait. We're special guests." That was local code for 'tourists from the past'. She frowned at them, familiarity still rummaging round her hindbrain. "Do I know you?" "I would think so," the woman sniffed. She pulled off her gloves one by one and slapped them against her thigh. She wore jodhpurs, boots, a white blouse and a hunting jacket. Both the man and the woman's outfits looked ostentatiously anachronistic. "We hired you as our guide on that Ice-Age shoot two years ago." The woman shivered dramatically, rotating her shoulders. "It was freezing." Horror dawned. Not these twits, again. It might have been two years ago in their time, but she'd encountered them only last summer in hers. They'd dropped in from who-knew-what time period near her study site in 14,562 BCE to make a movie about a group of people stranded in a prehistoric land that time forgot. Inside of two days, they'd managed to offend half the clan she was studying. Worse, they'd followed her back to her own time two weeks later, whining about being lost. She'd been forced to get the University to send them back to their proper period, since all uptime citizens were legally bound to see that downtime citizens got back safely to their proper times, to keep their own histories straight. And here was this ship of fools, grounded in the future once again. Their learning curve was decidedly shallow. "Your boss is pretty stuffy, but at least he didn't stop us from coming back," the man said. His name was "Bob", or something. The woman called herself "Lucinda". They were actors, though Lucinda insisted on being called a "star." Moira saw nothing celestial about her. "What a prude!" Lucinda was exclaiming, examining her red nails and buffing them on her jodhpurs. "He didn't appreciate your generosity at all. Seemed offended when we told him how lovely it was of you to let us take over your duck blind while you moved in with that hunk of a caveman." As Moira listened, her difficulties in getting a study nook grew clearer. "Really. Was it any of his business if you were having an affaire de coeur on prehistoric safari, as it were?" "You told him I was shagging Duria? I wasn't shagging Duria; he was teaching me his hunting magic, not his slow hand! I slept on the women's side of the camp the whole time." Why was she even bothering? They wouldn't listen to her. It had been a wonder the fools hadn't got themselves all killed before she could zap them back home. "Was that his name?" Lucinda fanned herself with her gloves. "I must say, he was quite the hunk. Too bad you . . . um . . . prefer women. It must have broken his heart." "I don't prefer women, you—I can't believe you told my advisor . . . . Look, there's no way I would have broken up a Pleistocene hunting clan for a quick how's-yer-father with their shaman. That's not simply unethical, it's stupid. Where did you people get your education in temporal mechanics, anyway?" "'Temper' what?" Bob said, looking confused. Moira wondered if that was a permanent expression. Gritting her teeth so hard two of her molars began to ache, she tried to explain. "You can't go hopping about the timeline like this. There are forbidden periods, you know, times you're not allowed to access, or that are too dangerous to visit. Just because we're nice to you lot from the past whenever you show up here in the future doesn't mean we fancy getting blipped out of existence because some idiot steps on the wrong kind of amphibian in the Mesozoic Era." They looked blank. Of course they did. "Why don't you just hand in your time device at the local precinct? The police will compensate you for it and give you a free ride home, no questions asked." Bob was now looking irritated, which didn't seem much of an improvement on his previous expression. Lucinda stared back down at Moira warily, and perhaps now with a bit of respect. "Why, I don't know what you mean." Aha! The University had confiscated one device from these twits last time, but Moira had always suspected they had another. Now she knew. "Of course you don't. A bit of advice, love. The 'I found Narnia in the back of a wardrobe' defense only works for your first trip. And all here present know this isn't your first trip. Just keep in mind that there are risks to time-travelling without a map. One of those is stumbling into a somewhen that gets you sent back to your own time for good." Bob spat out a laugh and loomed over her, his fists on his hips. "You're not threatening us, are you, little girl?" Unimpressed, Moira grinned up at them both and raised her closed hands. "Actually, no, I'm trying to read this livenote." Excerpt from
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