Аннали Ньюиц: The Future of Another Timeline

Her face twisted in spite. She yelled something that was unmistakably a curse and threw the baby at his chest. It had to be one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it took all of us by surprise—especially Elliot. He dropped his sword to catch the infant, and in that moment my two histories resolved themselves into one. I was no longer holding myself back to honor the memory of a lost friend. I was nothing but a bloodthirsty animal. And I knew how to kill. I sprinted forward, grabbed Elliot’s weapon where it had fallen, and drove it into his spine. As the blade scraped against bone, there was a crunching noise. A bloody metal tongue stuck out of his belly. The man fell to his knees and a grin cut across my face as I watched him dying. C.L. snatched the baby out of his arms before he slumped over.

Elliot spoke to me through teeth covered in blood. “Doesn’t matter if you kill me. More will come. I’ve set up a colony here, with workers—”

I kicked him in the jaw. “Fuck off, drone.” It was a curse Morehshin used, and I liked the way it felt in my mouth. Elliot’s blood oozed into a preternaturally circular puddle under the curving stones of the interface.

The baby was hiccupping and gasping in C.L.’s arms, Morehshin and her twin were embracing, and I couldn’t stop looking at Elliot’s impaled body. I hadn’t killed anyone in a long time, but my feelings were different now. This wasn’t a chaotic spree murder, rash and wrong. I wasn’t trying to burn down Irvine, or get revenge on men and the stolen authority that sustained them. This time, it truly was defense. I had made a calculation: him or all of us. Queens or people. Maybe, sometimes, death was the only answer.

Anita came to stand beside me, looking silently at Elliot’s body. Now his blood was dribbling upward into the stone. It reminded me of what happened with Morehshin’s vomit. Were bodily fluids the secret key to operating higher levels of the interface?

“Thank you for saving my life.” C.L. held the infant out to Morehshin’s sister, who crossed her arms and shook her head. “Don’t you want your baby?”

Morehshin cut her eyes at C.L. “That man forced her to bear his worker. She’s done with that job.”

Disturbed, C.L. cuddled the baby close to their chest, buttoning the mewling bundle inside their data shirt.

After conferring with Morehshin, the woman led us to the beach down a twisting path cut through sandstone that glowed like cheap blush wine. In hundreds of millions of years, these rocks would form the valley walls at Raqmu. I wondered where the archive caves were in this era. “This is Kitty,” Morehshin said over her shoulder. “I can translate for her.”

“What does she know about the Comstockers’ mission?” Anita asked.

Morehshin and Kitty had an exchange in their shared language. “Kitty thinks Elliot has been here for several years, but she’s been here only eighteen months. She was sent from my present to grow workers born in this time, so they couldn’t escape into the future. This is the only one so far.” Morehshin gestured at the baby C.L. was cradling. “She knew Elliot would never let her kill the child, because his job was to set up a colony. After there were enough workers, she was going to be queen for a group of men who could turn the Machine on and off to preserve their rights.”

“Can you ask Kitty what he was doing, making those cuts in the stone?” C.L. asked.

Morehshin and Kitty got into a long conversation, and Morehshin didn’t bother to translate until we’d reached the dying embers of the cooking fire on the sand. “It’s what C.L. suspected. He had a theory that those rocks were the remains of a much larger structure, and he was trying to re-create part of it. Some kind of metal lever or button?”

Morehshin had translated merely a fraction of what Kitty said. But at that moment, my body still jangling with adrenaline and emotional turmoil, I was too jacked up to ask more questions. Suddenly I was extremely hungry. Boiled snail sounded better than the feast we’d had at Sherry’s.

Kitty gestured for us to sit down around the fire, and the general consensus was that we should have a meal before deciding on our next move. As we ate, Morehshin used the multi-tool to build hands for Kitty. Gently wringing particles out of the glowing device, she assembled a translucent scaffold of bone, fibrous tendons, and finally a layer of green muscle beneath deep brown skin. Kitty reached out her forearms, and Morehshin pressed the right hand into place. The seam between artificial hand and biological arm emitted a red glow as they knit together. The look on Kitty’s face reminded me of Morehshin’s back in Manitoba, when I suggested she drink some coffee.

“Queens are not supposed to have hands. They get in the way of breeding.” Morehshin tinkered with Kitty’s new fingers, and said something to her in the language I suspected English would become. Nodding, Kitty gently plucked a sliver of pale trilobite meat out of a cracked leg and ate it. Morehshin nodded. “I think that’s working,” she said. Kitty attached the left hand herself.

The sun touched ocean, and Anita sighed. “Let’s get a good night’s sleep, and make a final assessment in the morning before we go back.”

Morehshin translated for Kitty, who agreed. She showed us into the cave, where she and Elliot had created beds with thick mats of seagrass. At last, she accepted the baby from C.L. for nursing. Everything reeked of the Ordovician ocean, a mixture of salt and seaweed, but I had gotten used to it. I stared out the mouth of the cave at the unfamiliar positions of the stars in the sky, and fell asleep without realizing it.

In the morning, Kitty and the baby were gone.

After we’d searched the beach, calling and calling, we gave up and climbed up to the Machine. I ran a finger over the semicircles of red rock, hovering beneath a nacreous blister of fluid. “Could she have used it to get away?” Anita asked.

“She could, but not the baby. A child born now couldn’t travel to the future with her.” C.L. fiddled with the settings on their shirt.

“Maybe she knew how to change that filter on the interface?”

“Maybe.” C.L. looked grimmer than I’d ever seen them. “Or maybe she exposed her baby. Left it in the ocean for the squids.”

Morehshin said nothing, and I wondered what she knew. Ultimately it didn’t matter. We had work to do, gathering as much data as possible before going back to give the Daughters of Harriet our report. The official report, from the Applied Cultural Geology Working Group, would come later. We had to decide what information to keep to ourselves.

I tossed Elliot’s body over the cliff’s edge before we left, still penetrated by his own sword. Let the next great man find him, and witness what we had done.

Los Angeles, Alta California (1994 C.E.)

I hadn’t spoken to my parents for two weeks. The loss of their voices over the phone was like those thirty minutes after a concert when I got out to the street and realized everything was muted, my eardrums thrumming with a missing, enormous sound.

On the fifteenth day, a Friday, Rosa said my father knocked on our door when I was in class, asking vaguely about his “friend” who lived in our room. “I said, ‘You mean Beth, your daughter?’ and he got really weird and said you needed to call home right away.”

There was no need to call, because he showed up again that night. We were in the lounge. Hamid was writing an essay for film studies, and Rosa and I were working with our study group on yet another nightmarish chem lab assignment. My father walked right in and said my name. He was using his “we’re friends” voice, his posture casual, a realistic smile on his face.