The Time Surgeons

“What a lovely day,” Vickie Gray said to her husband, as she looked out over the ocean, the early sun making the waves sparkle.

Their house was a modern one built at the top of a cliff, separated from the nearest public road by a winding access way through otherwise untouched coastal scrub, currently adding to the beauty of the day with its sprinkling of wildflowers.

If it were surprising that a historian could afford such a home in such a location, the fact was she couldn’t. But her husband was high in some shadowy arm of the Protectorate, and between them they most certainly could.

Vickie was an ambitious woman. She had enough brains to do well in whatever career she chose, and also enough brains to know that in the world she was born into, mere intelligence was often not enough or even necessary.

Left to their own devices, her genes would not have made her notably attractive. But they had made a good start, with a fine bone structure and a tendency toward athleticism. Judicious application of the surgeon’s arts had improved her, but not too much. People did not call her lovely; but they called her striking. She was attractive, but not too attractive: some teeth somewhat crooked, breasts well shaped but not excessive, a few minor flaws. These detracted little from her overall appearance, yet would suffice if someone wanted to avoid the reputation of being improperly concerned with physical beauty.

As well as investing in her body, she had paid chefs to teach her the art of cooking for maximum effect with minimum effort and expense. She had also paid prostitutes, not for the usual purpose but in order to learn how best to please a man. Having thus prepared herself for the two most traditional routes to a man’s heart, at university she devoted her time to study for her career on the one hand, while seeking out a suitable mate to ease her career path on the other.

She was ambitious but not as an end in itself. She knew there was no point having position and money if she wasn’t also happy. She supposed she would be happiest if she found love; but love was unlikely to bring with it the position and money. In any case her observations had left her jaundiced as to love’s permanence, which rarely matched the glorious intensity of its birth. She was not the kind of woman to leave her destiny to chance.

But she did want to be happy. So if she did not hope for love, she hoped for someone she could live with and be neither abused nor bored. And someone destined for a high position. So that is what she set herself to find, joining the student societies generally regarded as breeding grounds for the political elite.

She made herself popular enough to be invited to the best parties and be asked out by an array of ambitious young men. But she did not make herself so popular as to become a commodity. She generally dated a man only once, to take his measure according to her criteria. She had the normal needs of a girl her age, and slept with some: but only those who were discrete, good, but not good enough to nudge the physical pleasure into the folly of falling in love.

She had one false start. The man was dark haired and dark eyed, with a stunning smile and a way of looking at people as if he cared. She suspected he had invested in his own future in a similar way she had in hers. But hey, sauce for the goose… Their first date was excellent. As was their second, and on that night she allowed him to seduce her. For a while they became an item. But to him, she was just a convenience. She foresaw that he would dump her for someone more advantageous, or if not, it would not be long before her life with him became a bore. He would be too wrapped up in his own career to share it with her. Or probably both. Ambition in a mate is useful but dangerous, she realized. So she engineered an event where she found him in bed with another woman, and ended it amicably but firmly.

When she met Trevor Gray, she was drawn to him. He had a quick intellect and ambition, and a concern for other people that seemed genuine, not part of his game. They dated once, and she found him charming but sincere: two independent qualities in her experience. And when she looked into his eyes, the concern she saw there for others seemed to draw her into its orbit, placing her on a special pedestal reserved only for her. They dated a second time, and this time she chose to cook for him. He loved it, and made it clear that this gratification of his physical needs left him hungry for another kind. But she demurred, citing a desire to know a man better before she went that far with him.

They had a few more dates, while she played her double game: playing him like a fish, while assessing whether this fish should be landed or released. Finally, on their fifth date, she relaxed into his hands when he placed them on her shoulders after dinner; allowed those hands to wander downwards; then followed him to his bedroom. This time, she applied all the arts she had learned for just this purpose, and the fish was well and truly hooked.

The fish stayed cheerfully caught and she was happy to have it wriggling on her line. Their romance turned into marriage and her studies turned into a career as a historian, while his turned into a career in the government. They were happy, successful and popular.

Had some of the seedier gossip reporters chosen to look into their personal life, perhaps their reputations would have been tarnished – or enhanced, depending on the reader’s own predilections. Neither had entered their marriage imagining it was a match of passion and exclusive love until death did they part. Both knew it was more a mutual hand up the ladders of social and professional life than a union of souls staring into each other’s eyes for eternity.

So they were relaxed about certain issues upon which other marriages have foundered when strict expectations collided with looser realities. She knew that he travelled, sometimes for weeks. She knew that a man had needs even when his wife wasn’t waiting for him in his lonely hotel room. Had she been in love, she might not have thought that justified indulging such needs; but as it was, she did not care as long as he was keen for her own favors upon his return. More to the point for the purpose of their marriage, she knew that sex was a tool. After all, it was a tool she had used to acquire her beneficial marriage in the first place.

In times past, a prince would marry off his children in order to achieve political advantage. In the modern era things were more casual. Powerful women would enjoy the attentions of an attractive man, and enjoy his company in her bed. Perhaps only one night, consummating agreements made during the day. Perhaps a week, during an extended negotiation, cementing an alliance. Perhaps illicit meetings in anonymous hotel rooms when they happened to be in the same city, adding both drama and welcome physical release to otherwise routine but stressful travels.

Or it might be a meeting in which some potentate showed his wealth and generosity by providing prostitutes, explicit or implicit, to his guests. A man who refused might be considered weak, even effeminate. It was expected that a virile, powerful man would take such gifts as his due, and his wife would just accept it.

Vickie knew these things went on. She did not enquire about them, being uninterested in the salacious details, though sometimes he would tell her about the most remarkable or amusing of his experiences. Sometimes he learned something from them, and she gained a more direct delight from his education.

She wondered whether any of his unions had been with men. He was not bisexual, but she was first of all a historian: she knew that in cultures like ancient Rome or Greece, sexual relations between men had happened for political reasons. Their own world was somewhat prudish on the matter. Officially, any sexual preference between adults was acceptable. But theirs was still a world recovering from disaster, where children too often were hard to conceive or flawed if they were, and hence were highly valued. The population had long since recovered but the trauma still ran deep. In such a society the heterosexual norm was tacitly regarded as the ideal, and deviations unconsciously frowned upon whatever the public face. Perhaps that same attitude is why Vickie preferred not to know what lengths Trevor might have gone to for the sake of his career.

For her part, Trevor well knew her skills in bed, and appreciated how valuable they could be. Just as in her time as a student she would not make herself a commodity to be passed around, now she held herself back for special purposes, so as to increase the value of her favors. Given the value of some of the deals she helped to close, she could have been considered as one of the highest paid prostitutes in history.

He too sometimes wondered whether any of her unions had been with women, but preferred not to know: not because it was distasteful to him but because not knowing gave freer rein to his fantasies.

Vickie had a complex mind, and one could have taken a lifetime of study yet still not fully disentangled the delicate balances of its nuances. Her husband was a much simpler creature, as they often were.

Her marriage to a man with such position and influence eased the way to security clearances where such were needed. Her intelligence and dedication made her good at her job, and her social position made her known to those who, having seen it, would see her rewarded. Thus she rose in her profession.

In some ways the history of the world is immune to individuals. Its path goes on, perhaps slightly altered, but overall scouring its course over the small bumps and distractions introduced by the millions of people who briefly toil in some small portion of its immensity. There are some who by particular skill or sometimes chance will change its course, whose names reverberate down the centuries: warriors like Caesar or Genghis Khan; thinkers like Aristotle; scientists like Newton.

Some are unexpected. Few people in the world had heard of Vickie Gray, and if they did her name meant little to them. Those who knew her thought of her as a successful and popular woman, but not especially remarkable.

Nobody suspected she would destroy the world.

“What did you say?” asked Trevor, walking out of the en-suite while toweling his hair.

“I said, it’s a lovely day.”

He joined her by the window, put his arm around her waist, and admired the view.

“You seem particularly cheerful today.”

“Today’s the day they turn on the Machine.”

“You’ll always turn on this machine,” he growled, nibbling her neck. She laughed, and the start of their working day became somewhat delayed.