Аннали Ньюиц - The Future of Another Timeline

I shook my head. “I remember the documentary, yeah. But we aren’t lions, Lizzy. We’re people. We don’t need to eat rapists and creeps to survive.”

She snorted a soft laugh, sounding exactly like the pre-murder Lizzy I had lost. “Beth, I’m so glad to talk to you again. I am so glad you are alive and in the world.”

Lizzy’s lion story had momentarily diverted my attention from that alternate self, the one who committed suicide. Had Lizzy and I become best friends because we shared the urge to kill? Maybe we’d turned that urge in different directions, but it was still there, a fucked-up substrate to our love. Then the murders heightened everything. Each death took her closer to some kind of predatory ecstasy. But they took me deeper into the place my father wanted to lead me, where the solution to everything was a pure, self-destructive rage.

Still, my agony had eased after that day when Tess and I talked about what my dad had done when I was younger. That pulled me up short. How did she know that? Had my other self told Lizzy my secret?

“How did you know what happened with my dad? You said you knew what he did that one night.”

“Beth, your dad was mentally ill. He did a million terrible things to you. I knew that.” She touched my shoulder in the gentlest way possible and my eyes felt hot. “Yes, I was a shitty friend, but I wasn’t shitty in that way. I care a lot about you. I knew you didn’t want to talk about it, but I also knew it was… bad.”

“So… you know the thing that happened?”

“Which thing are you talking about? The time he made you shower twice before dinner because he thought you were too sweaty to be inside the house? The time he freaked out because we had our shoes on? The time he put you on restriction for three months because you got an A-minus in typing class? All the times he pretended he wasn’t your dad when he took us to the movies?”

My face hurt. “No. Not those times.”

“Okay. I guess I don’t know, then.”

“Do you think you really changed the timeline forever? What if I kill myself next year?” I was fearful in a way I had never been before. It was mixed with self-consciousness and melancholy and something else I couldn’t name.

Tess was silent for a long time. “It’s true you could do that. I always thought that if you didn’t have to see the murders…”

“I saw the murders.”

“No. You saw some of them. Not the worst ones.”

My body was thrumming with the uncanniness of everything. “You didn’t have to lie to me, you know. You could have said who you are. I would have believed you. Why are you always lying?”

“That wasn’t—I’m not. No. I had to say I was you because then you would know for sure you were going to survive. I wanted you to think suicide was not an option. I wanted to give you hope.”

“You always thought lying was easier than telling the truth.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Now you’re lying again.”

I stared at her profile, illuminated by a chaos of freeway lights, and willed her to say something else. But she wouldn’t. That’s one way she’d changed. Lizzy would have argued with me for weeks about her innocence, and how she was totally not lying and never would lie to me. Tess knew when to shut up.

Raqmu, Nabataean Kingdom (13 B.C.E.)… Raqmu, Ottoman-occupied territory (1893 C.E.)

I couldn’t stay away from Beth, despite all my failures. After everyone settled down for bed in 13 B.C.E., I snuck out at midnight to bribe some tappers who could send me forward. With the Machine right here at Raqmu, and airline travel on the other side, I thought I could pull a move from The Geologists . I’d save Beth on the night of her suicide, then travel back to the Nabataean Kingdom for Soph’s sacrifice. This might be my last chance to travel upstream to 1993 from a time with spotty record-keeping. Getting back down might be dicey, but I could talk my way into it. The techs in the early nineties knew me now.

I’d psyched myself up for failure, or something more ambiguous. But I had no way to prepare for the mental onslaught of a merging conflict. When I slithered back out of the wormhole into the chamber at ancient Raqmu, it felt like I’d been vomited up by an ancient ocean. The saline smell was horrible, and I had the crunchy remains of a graptolite colony in my soaking-wet hair. Which meant I’d been dragged through the Ordovician again—graptolites were common plankton in that period, known for nesting together in tiny chitinous tubes made from their own secretions.

“Welcome back.” It was one of the slaves whom I’d bribed to send me through, a man with a deep voice and dark brown skin who spoke in Greek. It had been a week in travel time, but only a few minutes here. Bringing a hand to my face, I realized the catastrophic headache I’d had in 1993 was mostly gone. It was such a relief that I almost started crying again. Though my memory was blotchy, I could move without wincing. I stepped out of the circle and drifted into the shadowy atrium, wondering if I would ever reconcile the two histories vying for dominance in my mind.

Beth was dead. Beth was alive. I had finally changed my past.

On the street, I stared at the shuttered shops and tried to figure out who I was. I’d known exactly what I was doing right up until that moment when I hugged Beth and alien memories started to pour into me. It was like suddenly remembering a vivid dream, except it was an alternate version of my own life. Not completely alternate—I was still here, still on the same mission for the Daughters. I was a traveler, teaching at UCLA. But there was a violent sense of emotional dislocation. Especially when I tried to remember what had happened during my undergraduate years at college, when Beth was there and not there at the same time. Or maybe it was more like she wasn’t there in two different ways. And the new way was so much more painful than the old one had been. How could her survival hurt more than her death?

I wove between stone houses, slowly finding my way to the rooms we’d rented at an inn. A sleepy goat crashed into my knees and I tripped on the offerings at a shrine outside somebody’s family tomb. The moonlight was blinding.

When I slipped back into bed, I was shaking with exhaustion. I wedged myself into the cot next to Soph and fell asleep instantly.

“Wake up, Tess! It’s almost midday.” Anita stood over me, brandishing three scrolls and a small basket of grain. “I’ve got everything we need for tonight.”

My anxiety latched on to a new target as I remembered our plans for Soph’s sacrifice to al-Lat. “What is all that?”

“Some background material and an offering.”

“Isn’t Soph our offering?”

“I hope so, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to bring a little extra. Every goddess likes some grain, right?”

I had to laugh. “I don’t know about goddesses, but I’m a huge fan of grain.” The headache twisting in my sinuses had ebbed away completely. As long as I focused on my recent history, this mission, my mind was relatively clear. But I still felt unlike myself in a way I couldn’t yet quantify.

During her studies at Raqmu, Soph had written about the goddess al-Lat. Here in the Nabataean Kingdom, she was a multipurpose deity associated with fertility and change. In other times and places, people worshipped her attributes under names like Mefitis, Isis, Venus, Kali, and Madonna. But Anita and I knew something about al-Lat that Soph didn’t. Here in ancient Raqmu, her temple offered protection to the Timeless who were not men—people like Soph, refugees from a moment when they faced death or extreme persecution. In other temporal localities, Soph might have gone to a convent or a women’s shelter. In this one, she had another choice.