Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

Irvine, Alta California (1992 C.E.)… Los Angeles, Alta California (2022 C.E.)

I slumped on the shady bench where Beth left me and tried to parse where I’d gone wrong. There was the immediate failure, of course. I hadn’t been prepared to look into the face of an angry teenager and explain why she needed to do something painful to benefit herself in an ambiguously defined future. But then there was my bungling over a week ago, the first time I actually talked to Beth. I hadn’t bothered to change my clothes after racing from the Machine at Flin Flon, through three airports, to that ugly subdivision where Mr. Rasmann died. Of course Beth had thought I was a crazy person and didn’t listen to me.

So now she was a killer, and I knew all too well how that felt. How it was going to feel for the rest of our lives.

I looked up at the towering eucalyptus trees that dominated this part of the UCI campus and took a long, shaky breath. The tangy scent of crushed leaves permeated the air, and a cloud elongated overhead, its body torn apart by air currents. There was an uncanny quiet here, in the nature zone. The Irvine Company had fabricated a plot of wilderness at the core of an academic habitat that was indistinguishable from the malls that surrounded it. Two young women walked by, their hair streaked with blond highlights, upper thighs coyly revealed in the flow of silky shorts from the Express. Flirty, but not slutty. Tan, but not brown. Fuck. I hated this place, where we’d had to choose between artificiality or invisibility.

I never should have come back upstream from 1893. It was a ridiculous extravagance to make the long trip to Flin Flon, and now I was stuck here. This wasn’t an episode of The Geologists, where everybody was always bouncing back and forth between times, despite the difficulty of reaching the Machines before we had airplanes. In real life, if I wanted to see Beth again, I had no choice but to stay in 1992. After that night at Mr. Rasmann’s, I’d scrounged up a dorm room at UCI for visiting scholars. But I couldn’t afford to stay here much longer. My covert visit was definitely in the historical record now, and extending my stay would raise questions in my home time. What the hell was I thinking?

I reached down between my feet, scooped up a stray acorn, and picked at its thick skin. It was useless to be angry with myself. After joining the ritual in Soph’s parlors, I’d felt strong again. Purified. There was no way I was going to leave my past alone. True, I’d missed my chance to intervene after the Grape Ape concert. But there had to be a way to revise that night in Pasadena—the one when I stood on the bridge, looked over the edge, and saw the crumpled, broken body. I dreamed about it every night. I’d wake up in my Chicago boardinghouse, dizzy with nightmares about how I was getting old and might never have another chance to repair myself. Once I was finished with this edit in the nineteenth century, I wouldn’t be in a position to go back to 1992 without raising a lot of questions. I had to change my life now.

Comstock was arriving at the Expo in August, and it would take me weeks to get to the Machine and back. If there were any delays, I might miss my chance to make the edit. But I went anyway. I told Aseel and Soph that I had traveler business, and I told the Algerian Theater performers I had a family emergency in California. When I’d gotten off the CP Line, I’d found passage with a group of Cree trappers doing a run past Flin Flon. My only peaceful nights of sleep came then, in the bush, on the watery road to my past. Once I was at the Machine, it had been easy to convince Wax Moustache to tap me forward to 1992.

And now I was here, feeling almost as shitty as I used to when I was murdering people with my friends.

I stood up and looked at the greenbelt around me. I could invent some semi-legitimate excuse to stay at UCI for the summer quarter, deliver a few guest lectures, and try to talk to Beth again. Or I could get out of here, back to my mission. There was obviously a reason why so few travelers reported editing their own lives, and maybe it wasn’t demon-induced madness or edit merging conflicts. Maybe it was failure.

A clot of students walked past, arguing about the upcoming presidential debates. My editorial efforts were nothing compared to what people did every day to change their own times with something as simple as an election. I needed to forget my conversation with Beth the same way I’d forgotten the night in Pasadena and most of high school. Whenever a memory emerged, I made myself think about something else. I focused on the blank anti-sensation of traveling through the wormhole. Inside its impossible mouth, history was obliterated.

Two days later, I got off the bus at the Flin Flon campus. But as I waited in line, I realized I couldn’t face returning to the nineteenth century quite yet. Talking to Beth had shattered my sense of purpose. I needed to see my friends again. Luckily I had the budget for a flight to L.A. up in ’22, so I told the tech to tap me there. She stuck a floppy disk into her PC tower and consulted an incomprehensibly huge spreadsheet. Everything was in order, and they had an open slot right now. I was going home, to my present.

I walked onto the smooth, damp rock of the interface and knelt, pressing my fingers to stone. I was surrounded by a ring of six tappers, connected to each other by wide, flat cables. A tech behind a row of humming CRT monitors typed a few commands, and the tapper closest to me started to pound out a pattern. Its felt-muffled mallets beat the ground like a bass drum, and then another tapper started, its rhythm complementing the first. A third joined with staccato bursts. Now I could feel the vibrations in my body, and the water rising up my arms and legs. But when the wormhole opened, nothing went the way it was supposed to.

I had a shocking, vivid sense of sliding down water-slick stone in the dark. Then I materialized in a dark, shallow cave, its mouth a perfect rectangle of sunlight. Where the hell was I? This wasn’t Flin Flon, nor anywhere I recognized. Terrified, I stumbled toward the cave entrance, which sucked me back into the wormhole’s familiar nothingness. When I emerged, I was cold and slimy and staring at a tech whose bendable tablet told me I’d reached the Flin Flon Time Travel Facility in 2022.

“You’re the second one to do that this week.” She looked startled.

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re completely covered in… is that algae? Are you okay?”

I touched the gooey blobs on my shirt, shivering. Then I flashed back to the cave. “Was there anything else unusual when I came through?”

She checked her tablet for readings. “Nothing that jumps out here.”

“I think I… It seemed like I fell out of the wormhole on my way here. Into a cave. Is there a way for me to get today’s sensor logs?”

“You can, yeah—the Machine sensors have a Slack channel where they output readings.” The tech jotted some notes, then looked up and cracked a grin. “It’s not totally unusual to see or feel strange things in the wormhole, but it’s impossible to fall out.”

“But this…” I gestured at a streak of bright green slime on my arm.

“Yeah, that’s definitely strange, but we’re seeing it once in a while. It doesn’t mean you left the wormhole. I’m going to take some samples.”

We scraped as much as we could into sterile vials, and then I desperately needed a shower. Good thing I’d left a change of clothes in a locker along with my mobile. That was months ago, but only a few hours had elapsed in local time.

I spent most of the flight back to L.A. distracted, staring out the window at wildfire plumes whose white fingers stretched across Saskatchewan and British Columbia. What had happened to me in the Machine? It was like I’d jumped in space as well as time. Could it be that the Machine was treating me differently because I’d changed the timeline? Geoscientists knew the Machines had some way to track the behavior of individual travelers, which is how they prevented us from going back to times we’d burned—or forward to futures we hadn’t yet lived through. Was there some specific reason I’d been rerouted to that cave?