A Light In Time

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*’t was the ’tisms, m’lord. I had this story in my head when I woke up, but then my head hurt so badly that I was typoing all over the place, so I decided to redo the covers for my collections…. and then I couldn’t stop. So I’m starting this at 9:30. (and just had food for the first time since 8 am.) It might be later than midnight by the time you see this. I’m sorry. – SAH*

Time isn’t exactly an ocean. But then again, it is exactly like an ocean. I should know. I, Leith Pappas, am one of the lighthouse keepers in the sea of time.

You’ve probably seen the lighthouse. My house. At least if you have ever visited Goldport Colorado you were probably directed to the Lighthouse House as one of the local attractions. The brochures put out by the chamber of commerce say that the house was built by a sea captain who became a prospector and struck it rich. Far from his natural habitat, lost in the Rocky Mountains, he built his lighthouse, so that when the wind blew late at night, he could imagine he was at sea.

This is not so much a lie as rank nonsense, made up to explain the lighthouse in the middle of town, with a large Victorian house attached to it.

The truth is that the house was there when the first colonists arrived. Because the time corps built it there as far back as we could possibly want to go, in the case of this location circa the seventeenth century. I understand the lighthouses in Europe and two in the Eastern United States are much, much older.

I’ve been the lighthouse keeper in Goldport since shortly after I joined the time corps. It’s a quiet a life, a little lonely.

(Removed because book — Christmas in Time — will be available for sale on Amazon 12-14-2025)

56 thoughts on “A Light In Time”

  1. No need to be sorry. Sorry is for mistakes or deliberate action, not illness. We want you back safe (sane optional) and not in pain.

    I can lurk under the chatroom couch for days, if necessary.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » THE VERY DELAYED CHRISTMAS CHALLENGE SHORT STORY:  A Light in Time.

  5. Oh Sarah. You just had to name him C. Pappas.

    One of the worst Leftist Democrats in New Hampshire.

    /sigh

    Not your fault. Not like there’s a master list of names of nasty people for authors to pick for villains or avoid for heroes.

    Like

    1. I know, S.C.R.A.P., not C.P. But, well, movie stars and actors, or people who go by Jose Victor Al Hambra Diego-Montoya Hertzenflutterstein and call themselves Joe Stein.

      Like

  6. Start reading. Hmm… Superman?

    Reads further. Maybe, but probably not, since he’s basically human.

    So the time travel era is after they’ve made the schrodingers, but before they figured out past of the problem was time travel? That should make things easier, once they figure out how to connect them.

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    1. Too late. He was already altered by his own timeline. They might have gotten the tyrant had dad chosen the orphanage instead of single parent route.

      Liked by 2 people

  10. Yes, laugh and cry. SOOO good. Though explaining why I’m sniffling at my desk at work should I get caught might be slightly troublesome. Being a vital asset, I generally get away with being caught looking at the memes. (A coworker sometimes gets caught reading ‘Yahoo “News” ‘, which I consider to be FAR worse. None of our memes are nearly as deluded or bereft of connection to the real world like the stuff on Yahoo News !!!)

    Liked by 1 person

  11. I have this story i tell when someone mentions killing hitler.

    “Please don’t try to kill baby hitler. We tried to stop the war.
    We tried killing Herr Glockenspiel before his ridiculous name change and rise to power.
    I spent most of my life living through WW2 Six Freaking TIMES
    and my team finally got it down to five years duration –
    Miami and London did not get nuked, there were enough jews left alive
    that they founded some sort of Isreal, the Swiss Alps are inhabitable.
    Best we could do was coax one of Herr G’s minor speech-making stand-ins,
    that little Austrian twerp, to lead the party.
    This is the best WW2 we are going to get. Please don’t mess this up.”

    This is always told it earnestly in first person, never admitting it is a joke.
    I love my work.

    Liked by 4 people

    1. Worse, you might stop WWII and the Holocaust. And the next thing you know, we’ve been eugenicized into genetic uniformity and a strain of flu wipes us ALL out.

      Liked by 1 person

  12. Nice Story Sarah!

    Oh, I couldn’t help but think of Harry Turtledove’s idiot novel titled “Joe Steel”.

    He had Stalin’s parents move to America before “little Joe” was born and thus became just as nasty as President of the US as he was in the Soviet Union.

    Turtledove “assumed” that Stalin’s evil was genetic and the US was “just like” Russia/Soviet Union. [Shakes Head Sadly]

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Genetics wouldn’t be sufficient explanation. A lot would depend on just where (and how) in America Stalin was raised, and who he associated with in college. We had more than our share of progressive leftists even back then. Family endured deaths and losses from some of them.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Agree about the genetics.

        And yes, he could have gone down a nasty road.

        But IMO for him to become as powerful in the US as he was in the Soviet Union would have taken Alien Spaces Bats to get involved.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Of course, there’s one thing to remember about Stalin.

          He didn’t take over “all of Russia” all by himself.

          Lenin and the Bolsheviks fought a civil war to rule over Russia.

          Stalin “just” took over the Soviet government after Lenin died.

          Joe Steel would need plenty of help to create a Soviet-like government in the US.

          Liked by 1 person

              1. Stalin’s mom was pretty weird. She wanted him to grow up to be an Orthodox priest, and instead she raised a godless Commie. (To be fair, a lot of backstory was involved. But yeah, not a nice family life by all accounts.)

                The more interesting alt was that Khrushchev apparently thought about immigrating to the US.

                Liked by 1 person

  14. Thank you for these Christmas stories. You make me smile, you make me cry. In a good way. I’m struggling with a lot of worry over health issues this year (mine and family members…) and the time with these stories has been a blessing. Peace and all the best to you and yours!

    Liked by 1 person

  15. When our son was born they put him on my belly in the approved fashion, and he promptly imitated a fountain. It was impressive, even from my point of view.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Which is why one quickly learns to place a clean diaper over the origin of the fountain while arranging the change.

      We had a diaper service, 90 or so fresh cloth diapers every week, and take away the used ones, of course.

      You may know/remember that little kids often become attached to a blanket or a stuffed toy; our son picked clean cloth diapers. Pretty convenient to replace them, and he was just tickled when the new allotment arrived!

      —

      Another lovely story, Ms Hoyt. Thank you.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. My eldest also attached to clean cloth diapers as “loveys.” (We used disposables and the clean diapers started as burp rags.) The best part was that he didn’t attach to them individually, so if one got dirty he would gladly swap out for a clean one, no subterfuge necessary.

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    2. The ol extra towel defense.

      Had to laugh at mom when she changed son. Neither sister changed my son (they had infants too, same year, so we were all busy). Mom? She had 3 girls. Guess she never changed nephews.

      How do they do this? I mean, really. Soaking wet diaper, yet here comes the stream, every single time. Of coarse it is on purpose. Has to be.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Mom was bathing her three-year old grandchildren (boy-girl twins) and the boy peed right at his sister (and hit the target).

        His sister was annoyed that she couldn’t “return fire”. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

        Liked by 2 people

      2. Boys can pee on demand from birth. That’s how they ‘write’ in the snow and other ridiculous things. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

        Liked by 1 person

      5. I am told that Grandma had forgotten a key lesson from sons by the time she came to help with first grandson…

        —

        I’m pretty sure I haven’t loaned my disposition to any time traveling potential dictators.

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    3. My oldest did the o’l fountain of youth 3 times when he was born, to nurses in the pediatrics ward who had experience with boys. Twice to the same nurse. He was skilled I tell you.

      Sometime in the first first weeks of having him home I was changing him when the spouse walks into the room, causing me to take my eyes off the little bugger for a second. “LOOK!!!” I turn back to the kid, and he has the biggest sh** eating grin on his face, as he pees on the wall. At which point I just waited until he was done, bundled him up and handed him off. And went and got the cleaning supplies and cleaned. Well played young man, well played.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. The ONLY time one of my kids did this was younger to a nurse who was, inexplicably, poking at him. She deserved it.
        Never did it to any of us.
        The older…. last time he did it to me he was one.

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        1. My Kids are Overachievers for Smart As*ery. One is quiet about it, the other is very upfront. There are days when I wonder where they got it from, most days I know.

          Liked by 2 people

  16. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » OH, YEAH, AND IF YOU MISSED LAST NIGHT’S VERY LATE SHORT:  A Light In Time.

  19. I really appreciated this story, but it wasn’t a tear-jerking sappy story like the others were. This is almost certainly because of the lack of blatantly obvious mathematician characters!

    Or maybe I’m just biased that way ….

    Also, I have an idea for a story bouncing in my head where time travellers are disturbed by the loss of about 30 million people who had died in wars over the last 200 years or so, and the mananged to trace all the unrest to a certain archduke who got it in his head that people should be free, and pursued reforms that over the course of 20 or 30 years eventually caused Europeans to be dissatisfied with their stations in life, hence the occasional war … so they go back in time to 1914 to assassinate him just before he got those silly notions bouncing arounl in his head.

    Liked by 3 people

      2. So there are a couple of naive ways of estimating the applied maths bros.

        One is to simply add up the maths category of the BLS OOH, to get around 500k actuaries, data scientists, statisticians, mathematicians, and operations researchers.

        Another is to go ‘wait wait wait, from other times I have looked in that document, this counting is clearly underestimating by five or ten or twenty times’.

        So obviously, part of this is how much of a purist Dan is.

        Another is the hard to estimate portion of how many, say, engineers, chemists, etc., start out not being pure mathematicians, and eventually take a step or into into that over the years during their continiuing education.

        But, yes, I am also a sucker for stories about people who think the way that I do, regardless of how statistically unrepresentative those people may be.

        (I almost always use the US OOH as an estimator for fractions of world occupations, even knowing that it is wrong.)

        Liked by 1 person

  20. Another marvelous story, I am really enjoying these! This one really gets me thinking about the choices we make and how they can set life onto a different course than it might have gone down. Thank you again Sarah!

    Liked by 1 person

  21. Another marvelous story, I am really enjoying these! This one really gets me thinking about the choices we make and how they can set life onto a different course than it might have gone down. Thank you again Sarah!

    Like

  22. I don’t like short stories. I keep getting anthologies to find new authors then not reading them. I think I have three from KU that have been sitting in my Kindle for years (while the other seven slots rotate constantly). You are definitely an exception to that rule. You’re very good at this. Thanks!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I get anthologies when they have an author, or more, that I already read regularly (series that come under “as soon as out”. Note, that does not mean I read everything that these authors writes, just there is one or more series.) This allows me to find new authors and series. Might have found Sarah this way.

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  23. Very nice, as usual. There may have been an onion-ninja drive-by during the singing of “Silent Night.”

    Please collect and publish these. I have money wanting to be taken for the purpose. :-)

    Liked by 1 person

  24. In re copyediting – watch out for the British silent h “An hazard.”

    Also in some of the other stories, “An history”

    Probably a tic you already know about, but never hurts to check.

    I have enjoyed the stories very much, especially the Colorado connections.

    And it’s nice to have a mathematician as the romantic lead for a change; I get tired of the same-old sword-swinging dragon jocks.

    Like

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