Unstuck
an excerpt

There are seven rules of time-touring, but the most important thing to impress on time-tourists was that they weren't really rules at all.

They were more like immutable laws, Thomas would explain wearily. Less like the speed limit on the skyway, and more like the speed of light.

By way of example, Thomas would often take the third rule: Minimize contact with the locals. The idea here was that any contact with any person in the past can have that butterfly-in-India-causes-hurricane-in-Europe effect (an effect Thomas knew to have been disproven in 2080 by Salzman, but it served as a convenient shorthand).

So that was the rule: stop chatting up the local barmaid in a 19th century pub, just in case she's destined that night to hook up with who-knows-who and pop out a baby Einstein in nine months.

But the truth is while it was a rule for the tourists, it was in reality a law as far as the universe was concerned. One could chat up the waitstaff up all one wanted -- if there was any important thread connected to that person-time, you'd get turned down. Or interrupted. Or lose your voice.

Or worse.

Still, there was one on every trip. Tours this expensive did not attract the sort of folk used to taking orders. This time it was Steve the ion-boom millionaire. He was determined to get what he wanted.

"Hey! Miss! An ale? Miss? Are you deaf?"

Thomas watched him from the bar-rail where he was chatting up some locals he had gotten to know since being stationed here. Small town 19th century people -- not the most scintillating lot, but you weren't going to meet a lot of go-getters in a town with thread-level of 2.

Across the room, Steve continued to try to draw the attention of the waitress.

"Know that person?" asked Artie, looking past Thomas to Steve.

Thomas massaged his temples, elbows on the bar.

"Yup."

"You do get some odd ones. Another one of your authors?"

Thomas looked at Steve and fumed.

"Financier, actually. Once we get the encyclopedia together, he's putting up the money."

The tour company had chosen Thomas's cover, with the idea that he would need an excuse for bringing so many people through a small town. So had arrived 18 months ago in the town with a bunch of papers, claiming he was assembling a small encyclopedia of modern knowledge. To the extent any of the tourists were odd, or seemed out of place, Thomas excused them with the typical eyeroll.

"Academics," he would say, "You know that lot."

And they would purse their lips or shake their head in sad acknowledgment. They did know that lot.

Women were a little harder to excuse, though the agency usually paired them up with men, or in the rare circumstance where a client would submit to it, brought them in as domestics.

At his table Steve continued to try to get the attention of the barmaid, and continued to find himself near invisible to her.

Cursing his job, Thomas bid good night to Artie, and went over to the table, sliding into the booth across from Steve.

"Hey, Steve -- she can't hear you. You gotta come to terms with that." Thomas said.

Steve was his normal combination of confused and angry.

"But I thought you said people could see and hear us. Are you telling me we're invisible? I paid 5 million to be invisible at an Scottish Pub?"

"We're not invisible. She's just not noticing you. That's a good sign there's a thread of history here that the net is protecting. Push against it and you're likely to get bounced."

The correct term was spontaneous space-time relineation, but like all the other time guides, Thomas referred to it as bouncing.

Steve appeared unconvinced. Thomas tried to figure out if he was lusting after the beer or the barmaid. Catching a sideways glance of his, it became obvious. The beer.

He wanted to tell him that the microbrew he could get back in 2086 was far superior to anything they would serve him here -- but he knew it was no use. Time-tours, for the most part, attracted uncritical nostalgia buffs. No one paid millions of dollars to find out that life in the past kind of sucked.

He decided to try another tactic.

"Look, Steve," he said, "We can go to another bar. This bar must have some active threads in it. But the zone itself is really clean. I rarely get bounced myself."

"Explain to me how getting one beer -- ONE BEER -- is going to rip apart the space-time continuum? Can you do that?"

"Steve, I don't know. But I've got a good sense you're getting ignored here because there's a thread somewhere near. There's plenty of places to drink, though -- we go down the road and your probably getting your beer within two minutes."

As Thomas had half-predicted, Steve simply ignored his warning, and pressed on, this time attempting to grab the barmaid by the arm as she came by.

Here we go, thought Thomas. Here comes the bounce.