Аннали Ньюиц: The Future of Another Timeline

“Hey, Tess. We’re here. Do you want me to drive you home? You look like shit.” Anita shook me gently and I woke up at the Los Angeles airport to find the pain had not gone away at all.

“Yeah.” I popped another few ibuprofen. “The feeling I told you about before… it’s worse here.”

Anita guided me to her car, and we said goodbye to Morehshin. The geology department would put her in travelers’ housing. We promised to meet at the Daughters of Harriet meeting next week, when C.L. was reachable—we’d arrived in our present, during the timespan when they came back to research the machine data. Our present C.L. would be back in a few days, seconds after our past C.L. left.

I groaned as we got into Anita’s old Prius.

“It seems like it’s worse the closer you are to our present.” She was thinking aloud. “Did it hurt this much in 1894?”

“No. It was uncomfortable, but not like this.” I stumbled after her through the parking lot. Sunlight was painful, and everything I looked at left a neon stain on my vision.

“Did it hurt in Raqmu when we went back to the fourth century B.C.E.?”

“No. I mean, a very tiny bit, once in a while. But not really. And nothing in the Ordovician.”

Anita raised an eyebrow. “That’s interesting.”

I was barely able to manage the seat belt fastener. “I really hope I don’t have to go live in the Ordovician.”

Back at my apartment, everything was maddeningly the same as when I left. I’d only been gone about four days in real time. Flopping on the couch, all I wanted to do was drown in the comfort of musical nostalgia. Squinting at my phone, I poked my streamer app and hunted for Grape Ape’s rare EP, the one with “See the Bitches” on it. That was weird. It wasn’t listed in my collection. Nor were any Grape Ape albums. I wondered if there’d been some annoying dispute with the streaming service that meant I’d have to get some other app if I wanted to listen to Grape Ape online. I didn’t have the energy to investigate, so I knelt down next to the cabinet with my record collection. I’d gotten a new turntable and this was an excellent chance to try it out.

None of my Grape Ape albums were there.

Had somebody broken in and stolen them? I suppose they were worth a little money—I had a few collector’s items, but only for that small subset of people who cared about feminist punk of the early 1990s. I rocked back on my heels, wondering if I’d stashed all my Grape Ape albums somewhere else during a fit of cleaning that might have been years ago in travel time. But then a terrible feeling started to grow in my gut.

I searched for Grape Ape online and found only references to a cartoon from the 1970s about a giant purple ape and his tiny dog friend. No matter what search terms I used, nothing came up. No Glorious Garcia, either.

Somehow, an orthogonal deletion had eliminated Grape Ape from the timeline.

I didn’t care if the neighbors heard me screaming.

A week later, the Daughters met at Anita’s house. We didn’t bother with preliminaries, and instead gave the floor to C.L., who made a full report on how we’d saved the Machine. It was their first time presenting a formal edit, and they had overprepared in the best possible way, giving us a nicely formatted dataset with a clear explanation of how to extract and analyze any slice you might want. To be fair, the news was so good for our project that they could have dumped a malformed smear of numbers with no metadata and we probably would have cheered.

And then I said the words I’d dreamed about for so long. “I remember a timeline where abortion was illegal.”

“So do I,” Anita said.

“Me too,” C.L. added.

“Holy shit.” Enid stared at us. “All of you remember a timeline where abortion was illegal in 2022?”

“It’s still technically not legal at the federal level. States have their own laws,” Shweta grumbled.

“But there’s no real enforcement,” Berenice noted. “And it’s only a couple of states.”

I spoke firmly. “It was illegal everywhere. All over the U.S.”

Morehshin broke in. “Women were dying. Men genetically engineered them to become breeders or workers. There was a whole biotech industry devoted to female containment and maintenance, and they had recently invented a way to replace a queen’s head with a—” She stopped abruptly when she noticed C.L.’s look of horror. “Sorry. I shouldn’t bring that up. That is not our timeline anymore. It is merely what I remember.”

Everyone fell into an awkward silence.

Anita popped open a bottle of sparkling pomegranate juice. “We won the edit war!”

“A toast to Harriet Tubman!”

“Long live her daughters!”

“And her mothers!”

“And her nonbinary kin!”

I stood up to raise a glass, felt a wrenching agony in my sinuses, and everything buzzed into dark static.

“Tess, I am taking you back to the Temple at Raqmu. I think Hugayr might know what to do.”

I was lying on Anita’s inflatable guest bed in her study. The lights were off, and I could see the last shreds of sunset through the window facing her garden. As long as I didn’t move a single muscle, the pain eased. But when I had to shift a little or stretch my neck to see something, it would all come roaring back. There was no point in arguing with Anita. I would do anything to stop feeling this way.

“Somebody will have to take over my lab. And finish teaching my class for this quarter.”

“Don’t worry about that yet. With any luck, we’ll be back in a few days.”

I slept most of the way to Raqmu, trying to outrun the agony with cannabis tinctures. We had to go through the Machine separately, and the only unburned time when we could arrive within minutes of each other was three years after we’d left Soph at the Temple.

It was my first trip since we’d shut down Elliot’s operation, and it was smooth. When I knelt to feel the water rise, there was a burst of humid air and the unmistakable smell of soil that had been chemically altered by plants and animals for millions of years. It was the planet I knew—the one with angiosperms and tetrapods and pterygota. The one where both land and water sustained life. I wondered how many times C.L. and their colleagues had gone back to repair the damage in the Ordovician, and if they’d learned more about the interface. I might never know.

When I emerged in 13 B.C.E., my entire body sang with relief. As an administrator from the Order noted my name and mark, I stretched my neck and arms to enjoy the tingle of motion without agony. I felt like myself again. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that my new self—whoever she turned out to be—didn’t hurt as much.

The temple was just as I remembered it, surrounded by a lush garden and artificial pools. A young adept brought Soph to meet me in the entrance hall, two scrolls and a writing box tucked under her arm.

“You caught me in the middle of afternoon study.” She smiled. Her hair was pinned up in the style of the late nineteenth century, and she wore the simple linen tunic preferred by most women who lived here. “Have you come to visit?”

“I’m meeting Anita. We need to talk to Hugayr about something that I’ve done to the timeline.”

Soph’s eyes widened but she said nothing. “I can take you to Hugayr’s office, but I have to warn you. She’s not in a good mood.”

I recalled how she ordered her students around and shrugged. “I’ve dealt with tenure committees, so I think I’m prepared.”

It had been three years for Soph, and only a few weeks for me, so we had a lot of asymmetric catching up to do. Now fluent in spoken Nabataean, Soph had made herself indispensable to the temple. She started by translating a few manuscripts, but quickly moved on to writing interpretive treatises about how the goddess should be honored in everyday life. Visiting scholars had copied her work to take back to their own libraries across the Mediterranean.