Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

“Nooooo.” Soojin fiddled with the knobs on her Boss DS-1 effects pedal, stepped on it with her boot, and played an intensely fuzzed-out chunk of sound.

For a few weeks after the party, Lizzy called both of us almost every day. She was apologetic and weepy. She begged me to meet her and Heather at Bob’s Big Boy and talk it over. Every time I found myself about to give in, I remembered the expression on Tess’s face— my face—when she said Lizzy was a bad person. Tess had also said she wanted to save me from something worse than the murders. Which didn’t make sense, because what could be worse than that? I kept coming up with increasingly repulsive answers to that question, and none of them made me want to talk to Lizzy.

I listened to Soojin practice snatches of a Bratmobile song and pulled out my AP Geology textbook. Normally I wanted to learn everything I could about plate tectonics, but today that meeting with Tess was itching at the back of my mind. Had I averted the disaster she’d warned me about by dumping Lizzy as a friend? Why had Tess come back to warn me, instead of stopping Lizzy directly? Maybe she didn’t care about saving a bunch of skeevy guys? I hoped that wasn’t why. I mean, those guys were definitely giant bags of dicks, but they didn’t deserve to die.

How the hell had I gone from being a kid who liked rocks to a murderer who traveled through time?

Staring at my textbook, I tried to imagine what the history of my family would look like as a geological time scale illustration. Over on the far left of the page, there would be a colorful hail of arrows representing the geophysical forces that made my grandfather decide to light his store on fire. In the next panel, we would see how those forces affected an underwater volcanic province, an angry red blob beneath the surface the planet, oozing upward into my father’s brain like spreading lava. Then there would be an explanation of the chemistry involved. Nasty-looking clouds of greenhouse gases from the eruption bubbled up from the deep water, changing the composition of our atmosphere, raising temperatures, causing drought. My father’s eruption left the parched land prone to massive forest fires. And that’s where I lived. The world around me was still burning because of crustal formation on the Atlantic seabed millions of years ago. Maybe Tess was the person I would become because of what my father had done to me, somewhere between the boiling waters and the soot forests.

“Wake up, weirdo.” Soojin waved her hand in front of my eyes. The bell for fifth period was blatting from the loudspeakers.

I walked to AP Geology in a daze, wondering whether I’d ever see Tess again. Would I grow up into her, and have to come back in time to visit myself? From what I’d learned in our unit on time travel, that was fake movie pseudoscience. It was more like her visit had reshuffled the timeline, generating a new history and future in its wake. Only Tess would remember the timeline that existed before her edit.

I wished she would come back. I had so many questions.

Chicago, Illinois… Raqmu, Ottoman-occupied territory (1893 C.E.)

Sol was right about getting an injunction. None of the theaters had to shut their doors. As soon as Comstock and the Lady Managers filed their complaint, Sol was at the courthouse getting an order to stop it. The Midway was making good money, drawing more tourists to Chicago than ever before in its history. After the newspaper coverage of our protest, there was no way that local judges were going to let some fusty New Yorker try to ruin the city’s new status as an international attraction. Our edit was propagating outward, turning Comstock’s campaign into fruitless foolishness rather than the moral crackdown and mass closures of the villages that I remembered from history books.

“It worked! We won!” Salina raised a glass of imported pomegranate juice in the dressing room, while Soph poured champagne for those of us who drank alcohol.

Morehshin sighed heavily. “We won this battle. But we’ve made Comstock angry. He’s not going to let this go.”

I took a swig of sour bubbles and looked at her uneasily. We’d made an edit, but that didn’t mean we’d made a difference yet.

Aseel poured a little champagne into her juice. “At least he’s back in New York.”

That was hardly reassuring. Comstock had ways of turning New York into a monster whose tentacles reached everywhere in the nation. After all, he was a special agent with the U.S. Postal Service. As our friends celebrated, paranoia needled me. I wondered who else was listening at the door, or opening our mail.

After appearing in the pages of New York World, Soph achieved a new level of notoriety. The danse du ventre was becoming a national obsession, and her article was one of the only decent descriptions of it written in English. A local Chicago press printed up two hundred more copies, selling them as pamphlets with crisp covers. Her parlors were full of new acolytes seeking enlightenment.

One evening in late August, Soph told us proudly that artists and writers from across the world were corresponding with her about the pamphlet. Aseel, Morehshin, and I were in her parlors, having a smoke before bedtime. Troubled, I touched Soph’s arm. “Aren’t you worried about sending it through the mail?”

Her face fell into seriousness. “Of course. But isn’t this what we wanted? Now people can decide for themselves whether the danse du ventre is obscene, instead of having Anthony decree it from his infernal throne.”

Aseel was anxious. “That’s true, but maybe you should stop using the mail to talk about it.”

“Don’t ever forget that Comstock wants you to die,” Morehshin added.

Soph laughed defiantly. “I’m not going to be quiet anymore.”

I shot a glance at her, thinking of how Comstock bragged that he’d driven abortionists to suicide. Soph’s friend was one of them. She was putting up a brave front, but clearly she knew the risks.

Morehshin grunted and stubbed out her cigarette. “If he kills you, then you’ll have no choice but to be quiet.”

“May the goddess protect us.”

“What do you really know about the goddess?” Morehshin sounded like she was asking a technical question, not a mystical one.

“I have devoted my life to study of the goddess in all her forms. I do not pretend to know her will, but I think I know her benevolence.” Her pale cheeks flushed. “Do people in your time still study the ancient Nabataean inscriptions devoted to her?”

“Yes. At Raqmu.” Morehshin nodded.

“I spent years there in the libraries and archives, learning ancient Nabataean, Greek, and Arabic. That’s where I began my career.”

I sat up, suddenly intrigued. “How did you come to do that?”

“My mother was a very devout woman, and she raised me by herself. We spent many nights with the Bible, and though I would not call her a compassionate woman—” Soph’s voice cracked and she took a quick drink. “Though perhaps she was not kind, she was progressive in her own way. She taught me that God came from a time in the universe before gender and sex. Our pronouns could not encompass God. And so when I came of age, I left our home in Massachusetts and went in search of a different kind of God.”

“You went all the way to Raqmu?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice. “How could you afford that?”

Aseel shot me a nasty look and Morehshin wore an offended expression. I felt terrible as soon as I realized how my question sounded.

Soph held her head high. “I read fortunes. I told men what they wanted to hear. I did what I had to do.”