Free Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson Page B

more than a few tight spots. I’ve gone ship to ship in complete vacuum wearing nothing more than a T-shirt and a pair of pants, I’ve walked unarmed into a hostile mining ship overrun with out-of-control cyborg mining birds, and once I even refused to smoke a bowl with Laurentien Francisca Marcella, princess of Orange-Nassau, queen of the Netherlands Court in exile on Ceres (a mistake I didn’t make twice). But I found myself thinking twice about the situation I found myself in.
    A woman dressed as a 1920s flapper walked arm in arm with an absolutely convincing Abraham Lincoln, while a short distance away a man dressed as a dowager empress of the Ching Dynasty was in close conversation with a woman wearing an exact replica of the pressure suit worn by Neil Armstrong for his first moonwalk. What appeared to be a bipedal tiger, wearing a green suit coat and pants, was in a heated argument with a heavyset man wearing a skintight scarlet suit, gold sash and boots, and white cape, with a lightning bolt emblem on his chest. A woman in a full burka was dancing with a man wearing WWII-era Japanese combat fatigues, a katana sword in an ornate scabbard hanging from his belt.
    It was a grab bag of history, myth, and fiction, all blended together.
    A tall woman wearing a sweeping dress of green velvet approached, followed by a pair of men dressed in the uniforms of the American Civil War, one in the colors of the Union Army, the other in that of the Confederacy. It took me a moment to recognize them as the superheroine and zoot suiters I’d met earlier in the day.
    “Hello?” I said, offering a weak wave.
    “O Captain,” said the woman in the lead, “welcome you to eine repast honoring, gathered among us on Cronos here.”
    I reached up and tapped at the earplug in my left ear before realizing that I’d been hearing the woman’s voice unaided through my right.
    “Um, thanks?” I answered uneasily.
    “Yo!” said the Union soldier, giving me an elaborate salute. “Our crib is your crib, mine compadre.”
    The Confederate soldier flashed an even more elaborate salute and smiled broadly. “The world of Cronos welcomes you, pal. We are chuffed to lens you.”
    “Excuse me, sir,” came the voice of the escort in my left ear, “but at the request of the Anachronists, sent nonvocally via interlink, I’ve neglected to translate their opening address, but on reflection, I think it best you make that determination instead.”
    I covered my mouth and whispered to the escort perched on my shoulder. “Is that meant to be English, then?”
    “So I am given to understand, sir.”
    “Practicing we be,” the woman said proudly, “locution English, all day.”
    “That’s extremely flattering,” I said, a bit unsure how to respond, “but I’m afraid that it isn’t necessary to wait for the translation any longer.”
    “So everything we say is translated for you instantaneously, then?” the woman said in another language entirely, which was simultaneously translated into crystal-clear English in my left ear.
    “Even though you don’t have an interlink installed?” the Union soldier said, his face falling.
    “The eagle still translates, and I hear it through this”—I tapped the little silver object in my left ear—“so you can just speak normally.”
    The woman looked crestfallen. “But we’d just gotten used to the authentic primitive experience.”
    “It is not to worry, lump of sugar,” the Confederate soldier said in fractured English. “Always we can speak the English ourselves, nah?”
    “Yep,” the Union soldier agreed. “Mine compadre, his is the truth of it. Leave us continue our English speak, anyway.”
    “You two go ahead,” the woman said in her strange language, English in my left ear. “All of that conjugating gave me a headache.”
    Just then, something behind me caught her eye in the direction of the threshold.
    “Ah, right on time.” She stepped forward and took my elbow. “I’d like