Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

“Want a cigarette?” Lizzy pulled a Marlboro hard pack out of her battered denim jacket. Our friend worked at the local gas station, and sold us cigarettes sometimes when he felt generous. We sat on the tracks and shared one, passing it back and forth until the nicotine made me dizzy.

“Do you feel weird? Different? Like we’re evil now or something?” I looked over at Lizzy.

She cocked her head, the mesh of her earrings catching the light. Her platinum hair was like a crushed dandelion today, soaped and dried into stiff, crazy angles. “No. I feel exactly the same. I mean, maybe that’s weird.”

“I don’t know.” I could see the roofs of my housing tract peeking over the wall fifty yards from us. Each one was exactly the same, their shingles kept in perfect order by the Irvine Company. “Everything is fucking weird.” I rested my head on my knees and thought about how there was only one more year until I’d be in college.

“Let’s do something tonight. Want to go to the movies?”

Of course I did. It was our default plan every Friday. “Let’s go to my house and we can call Heather and Soojin.”

Lizzy nodded and crushed the cigarette butt under a rock. We scrambled over the wall, wedging our boots into the crumbling mortar between bricks, and landed on some greenbelt next to the community pool. A few kids were splashing around with their mothers, who gave us dirty looks. Punk girls being disobedient. At least they noticed.

My house formed one end of a rectangular block of condominiums built with shared walls, like the suburban architectural equivalent of conjoined quintuplets. Each facade faced the quiet street with the same lopsided face, three windows and a door, painted in matching shades of 1970s tan. But the corner houses, like mine, had one extra window on the side wall that faced the street. My father called it “the deluxe model,” but he didn’t seem to enjoy it much. We had a strict rule in the house that the curtains always had to be drawn, unless it was raining, in which case they had to be open to let in extra light.

Actually, we had a lot of complicated rules, and they changed depending on my father’s mood. It kept me vigilant. Coming home, I always felt like I was donning futuristic sensor gear for detecting minute shifts in ground elevation. My lasers swept the area, bouncing off every surface, light receptors primed to detect any change. I unlocked the front door. Had any temblors perturbed the landscape? No. My parents weren’t home.

We went upstairs to my room and I popped a tape into the boom box. I had already memorized most of the new Million Eyes EP, though it still felt kind of new in my head. Lizzy dialed Heather and Soojin to make movie plans while the band yowled: “REBEL GIRL YOU ARE THE QUEEN OF MY WORLD!”

I cranked it up, but not loud enough that I wouldn’t hear the garage door opener announcing my father’s arrival in his classic VW with the fancy engine upgrade. Sometimes he picked my mom up after she taught her last class, but sometimes he headed straight home from the auto repair shop he’d inherited from my grandfather. When I heard a grinding squeal coming from outside, I turned the volume down and shut my bedroom door. I could feel my father’s rage seeping through the floor from downstairs. It usually took him a few hours to simmer down after work, especially at the end of the week.

Outside the sun was drowning in a Technicolor bruise of pollution, but inside we ate spaghetti and my mom made small talk.

“How are your parents, Lizzy?” She was using her high school teacher voice on us, which meant she was paying attention. Usually at dinner she read the paper and ignored whatever lecture my father was delivering.

“They’re good, Ms. Cohen. They just got back from a long trip.”

“Oh, how nice! Where did they go?”

Lizzy twirled her spaghetti deliberately. “Someplace in Jordan? It’s for work.”

My father was completely silent until Lizzy got up to use the bathroom.

“Why are you wearing shoes in the house?” He was whisper-raging. A couple of months ago, he’d gotten really focused on shoes. I’d come out of my bedroom with bare feet, and he’d ordered me never to set foot inside the house without shoes. Since then, I’d never taken them off unless I was getting in the shower or bed. Apparently, there’d been a reversal. I braced myself, sensors on alert.

“We got the carpets cleaned last week. Why would you ever think that you should wear shoes in the house ?” His voice had a poisonous edge that meant he was working his way toward a total meltdown. I stared at the ground, took my shoes off, and carried them to the foyer. Instant obedience and no questions were the best way to calm him down. I could intercept Lizzy on her way out of the bathroom and tell her to take hers off too. One of the many reasons I loved Lizzy was that she never cared when I asked her to do odd things, like suddenly take her shoes off in the middle of dinner. She accepted that we were taking our shoes off now, and then there would be more spaghetti.

“What are you two doing tonight?” My mother continued the small talk when we returned in our socks.

“We’re seeing a movie at the Balboa Theater with Heather and Soojin.”

“There won’t be any boys with you, will there?”

My father made a disgusted noise and nudged my mother’s elbow. “Delia, you do realize that if she were your son, you wouldn’t worry about girls being around. This is the 1990s. Everybody should be treated equally. So Beth is allowed to go out with boys.”

I couldn’t help but smile at my father, and he smiled back. It was one of those days when his rule-changing mania flipped back around to reward me. Sometimes he decided that we were allies. I wished I knew why, but in my seventeen years on Earth I had yet to discover a predictable pattern.

Chicago, Illinois (1893 C.E.)

In fall, I headed back to the late nineteenth century. Once the official paperwork was filed, all I had to do was grab an overnight bag and get to Flin Flon. We couldn’t send more than the clothes on our backs through the Machine with us, so it didn’t make sense for me to bring anything more. C.L. was fond of saying that theoretically we should be able to send anything through a wormhole. The only thing stopping us was an interface setting that geoscientists hadn’t figured out how to control with our tappers.

I texted goodbye to the Daughters, and left myself a few notes in my office about some outstanding questions from students that I wanted to answer in my next lecture. Even if I traveled for a few years, I’d be back at work next week.

One of the many things that drives me nuts about The Geologists, that BBC show about time travelers, is how the characters are always obsessing about period costumes. It seems like half the plots revolve around getting the right style of straw bonnet, or freaking out because somebody is wearing stockings that are made of non-period nylon. First of all, nobody pays that much attention to the small details of your underwear. And second, there are many ways to dress in every era. If I were to look like a proper nineteenth century lady from The Geologists, I’d blow my mission. I wasn’t trying to mingle with ladies. I needed New Women, those outrageous revolutionaries, college students, and artists who smoked cigarettes, read The Alarm, and supported Senator Tubman. To meet them, I wore a bicycling look of knickerbockers, thick knee socks, and a high-necked cotton blouse. A warm jacket fit snugly over the top, and I completed the outfit by tucking my long brown hair into a wool maritime cap. It was basically riot grrl style for the Gilded Age. And you’d be hard-pressed to find it in most history books, let alone a TV series.