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Gomez, another science fiction ace

 "Guardians of the Past" tells us about the option to travel through time, but places this choice in the hands of three kids and creates, without quite realizing it, a paradox. At the end of their travels undertaken to fix the mess they've created they will find a strange future, inhabited by weird mystical beings and hermaphroditic mutants—among other things—because these childred didn't know how important their family was, both in the future and in the past.------cyberanika.com

Beginning

Early in the twenty-first century, Sem and Rosie Peres lived in the little ranch house at the very top of Mount Washington, across the Mon River from downtown Pittsburgh. Their house was very small indeed, but they had the biggest satellite receivers in the neighborhood—five of them, in fact, all pointing in different directions. Sem was always bragging before his classmates about the thousands of TV channels he could see, from all over the world, but his parents had strictly forbidden him to bring anyone home. And that was not the only oddity about his family. His parents also got annoyed every time he mentioned having met a new friend, scored a goal at soccer, or been recognized for anything in class. It looked exactly as though his father’s dream was that Sem would someday become a garbage collector like himself, and Rosie a homebound mom like their mother.

He felt quite depressed about this until one day his sister Rosie took him aside with great show of secrecy.

“Sem,” she whispered, “I know why Mom won’t let anyone come into the house.”

“Really? Why?”

“We’re ‘Guardians of the Past’!” she said, jumping with excitement. Rosie was ten—two years younger than Sem—but quite slight, so there was little danger the noise of her leaps on the rickety floorboards would attract their mother’s attention. Still, Sem held her shoulders to make her stop. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know, but sounds thrilling, doesn’t it? I heard Dad say it casually when he was talking with Mom. I know it was important, because they changed the topic when they saw I was there.”

“Did you hear anything else?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s not very useful,” said Sem, “if you don’t know what a Guardian of the Past is.”

“You don’t know what it is?”

“No. Why don’t you go ask Dad?”

“I don’t think he’d tell me. He seemed annoyed at my being there.”

That night, Sem had a hard time getting to sleep. So they were “Guardians of the Past” . . . how grand! The name conjured up images of knights in shining armor, riding atop horses covered with tapestries and yet more armor, amid the blare of trumpets and the clanging of swords. It made him recall the dream he so often had—so real that he wondered whether he had truly lived it—of a city full of gleaming spires made of steel and glass, with cars flying between the spires.

But of course, flying cars could never be in the past, so the whole thing was likely a dream born of his frustration. How could a poor immigrant with a job collecting garbage, and who could barely speak the local language, be like one of those knights? And Mom? How could that be applied to a housewife with four kids?

How different from their life in the smallest house in the neighborhood, the drab little school down the hill, the deathly dull classes of Miss Lollipop and the constant nagging of the school bully, Max Martin, even if he was the brother of Austin, his best friend in addition to local genius.

If Max got wind of the title it would be impossible to shake him off until the end of the term, so Sem resolved to ask Rosie to quit spreading stories that would get him into more trouble with his classmates.

He muttered, “Time please” with a soundless motion of his lips. The scanner picked it up and displayed the time in dull purple figures floating in the middle of the room.

12:23 AM

It was late and he still was too excited to sleep, so he said, “Neuralizer please,” as silently as before. There was a soft buzz while the neuralizer waves massaged his brain. He felt a warmth coming all over his body—and he fell asleep wondering how come there were no ads for such a useful gadget in any TV channel.

Chapter 3

“It’s not an ‘accomplice’ if you don’t commit a crime,” he said to steer the conversation into semantics, but he still felt his cheeks reddening. Maybe she was right and he was forcing her to climb all the way up Mount Washington because he was scared of a kid with freckles, not because he wanted to follow Dad’s orders. How unfitting to a Guardian of the Past! A Guardian of the Past would have never flinched. He would have just smiled at the gauntlet thrown to his face and picked it up saying, sarcastically, “yours, Milady?” or something of the sort. Then he would have lowered the visor of his shining helmet, grasped his weapon, and—

And the moment had arrived, for here was Max with his cronies, all on bicycles, up at the end of the street.

“Semmy, yoo-hoo!” Max sneered. “I have more gifts for you-hoo! Soggy Semmy!”

Max, Bert and Rufus lifted their arms. They were holding something in their fists: water balloons, or worse. Bert’s bike began to move down the hill.

His bike picked up speed and soon they saw the murderous glow in Bert’s eyes and, finally, what he hid in his hand.

It was a balloon all right, but it wasn’t filled with water. It was much too bright for that.

It was paint.

“Left, quick!” said Sem. They jumped off the sidewalk into a doorway that opened at their level, narrowly missing the paint-filled balloon that Bert had thrown at them. It splattered on the sidewalk making a huge splotch, green like the barf of a giant slug. Bert McMurray’s bike darted past them and was lost down the street.

“Damn!” he said, loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear it.

Sem didn’t have time to feel proud, for here was Rufus Grabowski barreling down the street towards them, his weapon hand ready. The doorway was not deep enough to provide a decent cover; rather, it seemed calculated to keep them pinned while Rufus took his time aiming the projectile.

“Let’s get out of here!” said Sem, yanking Rosie’s arm so hard that she cried in pain. He ran to the middle of the street and waited until Rufus looked committed to throw, then he shoved Rosie to his right while he fell to the left. The balloon passed between the two and splashed on the cobblestones. Rufus veered hard right, in time to avoid the slippery splotch, and kept racing down, cursing as loudly as Bert had done before.

Only Max himself was left, already coming down the street but not nearly as fast as his cronies. The worn-out brakes squealed against the rusty rim.

Then the bike stopped, and Max dismounted.

“Feeling like a toreador, eh mojado?” he said. “We’ll see if you can avoid a bomb down your collar.”

He swaggered towards them, and Sem saw he was carrying two paint balloons—one for him, one for Rosie.

“Get out of here, Rosie,” he said. “This is just between him and me.”

“The hell I am!” she said, rubbing her leg, which she had scraped when Sem pushed her.

Rosie would not budge, so he dropped the backpacks (he was still carrying both) and began to pace up the street. Max’s eyes flashed with anticipation of his revenge.

Just then, a cement truck started moving at the top of the street. Perhaps Max and his cronies had climbed it looking for ammunition better suited to their purpose, and their added weight made its brakes fail, or perhaps they were ready to go and it just happened then. Whatever the cause, the driverless truck moved slowly at first, but by the time Sem noticed it, it was already charging down the steep street.

Max did not notice it. He kept pacing down the street toward Sem, both hands cocked next to his head, ready to launch.

“Afraid, ah? Your pants are wet,” he said, and let out an evil chuckle, but Sem was not afraid of him, but of the runaway truck, which had just scraped its way past two cars parked two hundred feet up the street without losing any speed.

“Look out!” yelled Sem. He turned around and began to run down the street.

“Ah, you’re all yellow already, but you’ll be even more yellow very soon.”

The truck reached the point where Max’s bike lay on the cobblestones. It crunched it and kept going. Max recognized his bike’s dying screech as it flattened under the truck tires; he took a quick glance, dropped the balloons, and began to run after Sem.

Being the school’s leading athlete, he had almost overtaken Sem when they got to the green splotch on the pavement. Sem saw it and jumped clear of it, but Max did not see it.

“Sem!” Rosie called from inside the deep doorway where she was hiding.

Sem looked back and saw Max on the ground, covered in slime-green and grimacing, and the truck still coming down.

Without thinking twice, he stopped and rushed back. He reached Max barely ahead of the truck. Max was heavy, but somehow Sem found enough strength to pull him upright and, in the same motion, shove him toward the houses on the right side of the street.

The truck veered that way as though aiming for them, but then its front tires hit the curb and it steered back to the middle of the street, causing no more damage than a splash of half-set cement. It went all the way down until it slammed into a car that was parked there with a loud crash and a rain of metal parts.

Chapter 32

Sylvan did not let him out of her sight for the whole afternoon, while she showed him places very few humans had seen, like the birth center (it was in a different mall, so they had to ride the transit to get there) and a cybernetic center where people got their augmentations repaired.

There was not much to see in the birth center: only adult virgos going in and out of a room where apparently they had eggs “collected” from them. Next to the egg collection room was a very large room they could not enter because Sylvan did not have the necessary clearance, but which they could see nevertheless through its many windows into the hallway. In the dim red light that filled the room, one could distinguish row after row of objects that looked like rectangular fish tanks. Sylvan said those were the birth tanks, where babies grew until they were big enough to digest food, and got their BBF and twining chips inserted. Sem asked her if people were allowed to have children of their own, but she made a face and said virgos just couldn’t do that, and that it was an animal thing and people just did not behave like animals—which sounded like quite a strong statement, since he had not seen a single animal since his arrival.

Then Sylvan dragged Sem to the cybernetic center, which was next door. Virtually everyone in there had mechanical legs or arms (sometimes three or four of them) or other appendages whose use Sem could not guess. Two of the people appeared to have wings, although these came out of their sides and were too low to make them resemble angels—or devils, more likely, given the wings’ webby pattern. Sylvan explained that many people now were moving into space, and wings like those were very useful in low gravity environments. The people with metal legs either were moving to a high-gravity planet or were pitball players.

The local Journey center was a short walk away, in the very midst of the mall. After the archway was a broad lobby full of chairs and lined with closed doors. A dozen people sat in the lobby, as though waiting for something or someone. Then a door opened on the right side and a few of them got up and rushed toward it. Soon a young virgo came out, dressed in a flowing tunic, like a wingless angel, and the others began to embrace her excitedly.

“See that one over there, in the white tunic?” Sylvan said. “He’s just had his Enlightenment. They say it’s quite something. I can hardly wait for mine. Although, to tell you the truth, I’d like to be able to choose who’s going to enlighten me, as you do.” And she looked at Sem with such languid eyes that he started feeling very uncomfortable.

It was essential to change the topic before she went down that road too far. “Is that the same as that thing they call the Journey?”

Sylvan chuckled. “No, how silly! The Journey is for adults, not for children. Look!” She pointed to another young person in a white tunic, who was about to go through an open door hand in hand with an adult who seemed to be of the same age as the prefect. “Do you see those? The child is about to have his Enlightenment and the adult will have his Journey.”

“But where does the adult go when it’s done? Only a child came out of the other door.”

“Oh that! Both child and adult share the same body now,” said Sylvan, getting so close to Sem that he jumped back by reflex. “I wouldn’t know, of course, but they say it feels like waking up from a long dream.”

“And the adult?” Sem insisted, hoping she’d keep to theoretical explanations of the process.

“I told you already. He’s in there too. Both are in the younger body now.”

“But what happens to the other body?”

“There you go again! What else can we done? It’s just recycled . . . . Nothing goes to waste here.”

Sem gasped. “You mean dead? Killed?”

“Only the body. The mind is intact, though. They say it feels like getting a new suit.”

“And the child?”

“I told you,” said Sylvan with a snort. “The child is still in there, only now he knows everything the adult knows. School is over for him. He’s enlightened now.”

“No he’s not!—she’s not, damn it! She’s now a slave of that adult’s mind, and the mind isn’t the adult either, because the adult is dead!”

“What’s that nonsense?” said Sylvan, glowering. “Are you saying you know more about us than myself?”

“No!—Yes! Don’t you see? I am I, and you are you. Putting my memories into your brain doesn’t make you me, nor do I become you because of that. If I’m killed, I’m dead.”

“Oh really? And where were you during those hundreds of years you claim you were inside that machine. Are you eight hundred years old, too? And when you came out, was it the real you or someone else who thinks it’s you, while the real you has been dead for eight hundred years?”

He had no answer to that. He just mumbled, “But at least I haven’t been brainwashed like you,” and shut up before she worked herself into unreason as did Rosie, and Mom, and all the women he knew, when they felt contradicted.

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