Flux by Orson Scott Card Read Free Book Online

asked.
    â€œMy business.”
    â€œI have to know your purpose, or how can I find you a day?”
    And so he had to name it. “I’m going to have her if I can.”
    Suddenly a small alarm sounded, and Jock’s voice was replaced by another. “Warning. Illegal use of THIEF for possible present-altering manipulation of the past.”
    Charlie smiled. “Investigation has found that the alteration is acceptable. Clear.” And the program release: “Byzantium.”
    â€œYou’re a son of a bitch,” said Jock.
    â€œFind me a day. A day when the damage will be least—when I can…”
    â€œTwenty-eight October 1973.”
    That was after he got home from So Paulo, the contracts signed, already a capitalist before he was twenty-three. That was during the time when he had been afraid to call her, because she was only fourteen, for God’s sake.
    â€œWhat will it do to her, Jock?”
    â€œHow should I know?” Jock answered. “And what difference would it make to you?”
    He looked in the mirror again. “A difference.”
    I won’t do it, he told himself as he went to the THIEF that was his most ostentatious sign of wealth, a private THIEF in his own rooms. I won’t do it, he decided again as he set the machine to wake him in twelve hours, whether he wished to return or not. Then he climbed into the couch and pulled the shroud over his head, despairing that even this, even doing it to her , was not beneath him. There was a time when he had automatically held back from doing a thing because he knew that it was wrong. Oh, for that time! he thought, but knew as he thought it that he was lying to himself. He had long since given up on right and wrong and settled for the much simpler standards of effective and ineffective, beneficial and detrimental.
    He had gone in a THIEF before, had taken some of the standard trips into the past. Gone into the mind of an audience member at the first performance of Handel’s Messiah and listened. The poor soul whose ears he used wouldn’t remember a bit of it afterward. So the future would not be changed. That was safe, to sit in a hall and listen. He had been in the mind of a farmer resting under a tree on a country lane as Wordsworth walked by and had hailed the poet and asked his name, and Wordsworth had smiled and been distant and cold, delighting in the countryside more than in those whose tillage made it beautiful. But those were legal trips—Charlie had done nothing that could alter the course of history.
    This time, though. This time he would change Rachel’s life. Not his own, of course. That would be impossible. But Rachel would not be blocked from remembering what happened. She would remember, and it would turn her from the path she was meant to take. Perhaps only a little. Perhaps not importantly. Perhaps just enough for her to dislike him a little sooner, or a little more. But too much to be legal, if he were caught.
    He would not be caught. Not Charlie. Not the man who owned THIEF and therefore could have owned the world. It was all too bound up in secrecy. Too many agents had used his machines to attend the enemy’s most private conferences. Too often the Attorney General had listened to the most perfect of wiretaps. Too often politicians who were willing to be in Charlie’s debt had been given permission to lead their opponents into blunders that cost them votes. All far beyond what the law allowed; who would dare complain now if Charlie also bent the law to his own purpose?
    No one but Charlie. I can’t do this to Rachel , he thought. And then the THIEF carried him back and put him in his own mind, in his own body, on 28 October 1973, at ten o’clock, just as he was going to bed, weary because he had been wakened that morning by a six A.M. call from Brazil.
    As always, there was the moment of resistance, and then peace as his self of that time slipped into