THE BETTER PART OF VALOR. Morgan Mackinnon

      Chapter 16

      It was nearly midnight when Cresta reached her farmhouse just outside Fairfax, Virginia. She felt numb but went through the motions of putting the car in the garage, shutting the garage door, unlocking the front door, turning off the alarm system, reactivating the alarm system. Then her cats, Max and Mehitable, came meowing over. Both were proud creatures of the American species known as the Sphinx. Primarily developed in the United States, the Sphinx breed is hairless and bears a striking resemblance to a gargoyle. Some breeders even insist they are part cat, part monkey, and part child. Odd-looking to most, even ugly to some, the cats have large ears and wrinkled skin. Because they are hairless, oil accumulates on their bodies, requiring weekly bathing. Because they have no hair, they must be kept warm. In winter, they wore sweaters; in summer, little T-shirts.

      Today Max, a tawny gray, was wearing his blue and yellow striped sweater—garments Cresta specially ordered. High necks and little sleeves that came about halfway down on the front legs. Mettie, a light beige Sphinx, had on her powder-blue and pink sweater featuring little black mice here and there. Cresta paused long enough to kiss each nose before heading into her kitchen. She’d inherited this house and farm from her great aunt and had never gotten around to doing anything major to most of it other than upgrade the kitchen appliances and have an old-fashioned footed tub added to the master bath. She loved that tub. Finding a “tub rack” fitted out with a reading stand had been a major coup; for now, she could fill the tub with bubble bath, soak, sip seltzer (or wine) and read, all at the same time.

      The major thing she had done was to take the so-called sitting room downstairs and turn it into a library. Cresta could not see the point of having a “family room” and a “sitting room” when she had no intention of doing much sitting. Her job kept her away during the day, even some evenings, and she didn’t have that many friends over. She didn’t need the ubiquitous “family room” because her “family” had four paws each and wore small sweaters. All they needed was a large cat bed on the floor for daytime napping (they spent their nights on Cresta’s bed or sofa) and a wicker basket for their toys. She’d had the wall between sitting room and family room knocked down and the enlarged room filled with row upon row of bookshelves. The library project had turned out better than Cresta hoped, and she now used the space for her home office as well.

      The first order of business was to pour some lactose-free milk into two dishes and nuke them for ten seconds. Many cats cannot tolerate lactose, and since Max and Mettie loved milk so much, this was Cresta’s compromise. Personally, Cresta couldn’t stand the stuff.

      Once the milk had been taken care of, she located two cans of moist cat food and filled the food dishes. For her part, simply a glass of red wine would do. At around 9:30 that evening, Jim ordered some pizzas to be delivered to the secretary’s office upstairs and those had been dinner. The meeting with the team lasted much too long, but if what Sammy Chen uncovered was true, they had a dilemma on their hands. Their charter, their carefully constructed top secret working objectives, only allowed the extreme step of bringing a person from the past to the future if (1) it was the only way to stop a political or military disaster of epic proportions and (2) there really was no other way.

      The danger was obvious. Bringing a person from the past to the future, by the very act alone, changed history. It had to be established the history to be changed would not be consequential. Due to ethical and moral constraints, the charter also warned against separating families. How terrible would it be to tell a person in the past they had to leave their loved ones forever in order to perform some function in the future?

      Ah, therein lies the rub, she thought. Why not simply pluck this person (she paused to reach into her briefcase for a notebook) this Mr. Keogh from 1840 and…no wait. He was born in 1840, so let’s say 1860, transplace him to 2002, tell him to go forth and impregnate some woman, and then pop him back into his own time?

      Cresta sat up. That could work. It could work, except if this Mr. Keogh had any backbone or ethics of his own, he might want to stick around, provide for the child, and see him grow up. Okay, her brain countered, it’s not really any different than a sperm bank. It’s just this sperm bank would be a walking one. There was also the concept of memory to worry about. Theoretically, once Mr. Keogh was placed back in his correct time, he would have no memory of what had happened. The experiments with Danny Convers to the past and, more especially, Sammy Chen to the future, had proven this theory to be untrue. Sammy remembered every bit of what had happened to him in the future.

      She reached to refill her wineglass. Yeah. If Mr. Keogh was a typical man, he’d probably welcome the opportunity to play around a little while out of Mrs. Keogh’s sight. Men can be dogs, and Cresta knew that well. She’d married one. In the middle of graduate school, she met a wealthy, upstanding young man who looked good and was going for his PhD in anthropology. They dated, they laughed, they got pregnant…all right, she got pregnant. To hear him talk about it, the entire episode was all her fault. They married, a month later Cresta miscarried, and Mr. Arthur Van Brunt III divorced her in a New York minute. Cresta, at that point, figured she got off easy and did not ask for any alimony. Her mother was still upset over the incident, in her own way inferring perhaps her daughter had been at fault.

      “But, Dear, couldn’t you have tried a little harder to make the marriage work?”

      It was after the divorce Cresta learned Mr. Arthur Van Brunt III had been running around before the marriage as well as afterward and managed to impregnate at least two other women at the university. It was the era of free love, and damn the contraceptives.

      That gave Cresta another thought. What if they brought Mr. Keogh to the future to spawn a descendant, only to find he was gay? Disinclined to sleep around? She came full circle to her Men are dogs position and sighed. Maybe we can find a brood mare, I mean a Fertile Myrtle and take her to him? Then he could do the deed and not have to interrupt his ordinary, daily life.

      Flipping off the lamp, Cresta lay back on her comfy sofa. About half the time she pulled a throw blanket over herself and fell asleep where she was. And as she was about to drop off, she idly wondered who, what, and where Mr. Keogh was.