Аннали Ньюиц: The Future of Another Timeline

“It’s similar to what I wrote back in my present, but here they take it a lot more seriously.” She had a note of pride in her voice. “And it doesn’t get you sent to jail, which is nice.”

“I’m so glad we got you out of that shithole, Soph.”

She sighed. “I miss it, though. I miss Aseel and my other friends. I miss my parlors. I miss gin. I even miss the smell of the river!”

I put my arm around her and squeezed. “Aseel is doing great—she’s running Sol’s sheet music business. I’ve never seen her so happy. And busy!” Then I told her about the dance contest that changed the Comstock Laws, and Morehshin’s sister from the future, and how C.L. had data so good they were sure to get published in Nature Geoscience, or maybe Nature proper. It was a big breakthrough for understanding the origins of the interface. “We changed the timeline, you know. We won the edit war.”

Soph stopped me on the threshold of the chamber with the three-faced goddess statue. “One thing I’ve learned while studying here, Tess. There is no end to the edit war, and we can never claim victory. The timeline is always changing. So are we. I think perhaps… all we can hope for are small mercies. One life spared. One good deed. Do you understand?”

I searched the pale blue of her eyes, wondering if she knew more than she let on. “Anita always says that small things change, and big things don’t.”

“She’s right.”

When we knocked on Hugayr’s office door, one of her students opened it right away. Over her shoulder, I could see that Anita was already there, deep in conversation.

“Oh hello, come in!” Hugayr gestured us to some cushions around a small table made from bronze and wood. Then she glared at the student. “You—bring us some beer, and then get back to work on your manuscript. It’s showing some promise.”

The student hurtled out of the room, a tiny smile of accomplishment on their face, and returned with ceramic mugs of a foamy drink that smelled like barley and pepper. I sipped experimentally. Didn’t taste exactly like beer from my present, but close enough.

Hugayr put her mug down. “Tess, I have already told Anita. You can’t go home. It will kill you.”

I panicked, overwhelmed. “There’s nothing we can do?”

“We have other Timeless here who have experienced the same thing. When you edit your own life, it can be very painful. Not for everyone. Some people—they do an edit, get their loved one back, and live happily ever after. Some people feel only a little discomfort and then it goes away. But you are one of those unfortunate people who is completely fucked.”

“Why me? All I did was bring a loved one back, like you said.”

Hugayr wore a dubious expression. “Anita told me what you did. You created a highly divergent timeline. You edited your entire adult life all at once. Of course it made you sick. Didn’t you think about that before you did it?”

“Well, yeah… but it seemed like it was going okay until…”

“Until the edit actually took?”

I picked at a sliver of wood on the table leg. “I don’t get it. That was supposed to be a small change. But we made a huge change to women’s rights and abortion law, and nobody else is sick. Shouldn’t that have changed all our lives profoundly?”

“What is abortion?” Hugayr glanced at Soph for clarification.

“Ending a pregnancy.”

“I see. You changed some laws made by men. Yes. Did you change any women’s lives?”

“I guess… I changed Beth’s life.”

Anita scratched her head. “We changed Kitty’s life, I think.”

“Did either of those women’s lives change specifically because of what you did to men’s law?”

“They were two of the millions of women whose lives were changed. Reproductive rights improve our choices, give us freedom, allow us to follow new paths… it was a profound alteration of history.” I trailed off when Hugayr gave me the frown she usually reserved for students.

“Think. Why would you feel a big change less than a small one?”

I thought about all those people linking arms to protest Comstock at the Expo, the dancers at Sherry’s, Sol’s strategic carnival wisdom, and the Four Hundred on their thrones. “It was collective action. So many of us worked to change the laws that the effects are spread out and attenuated. I guess all of us feel it a tiny bit. But with Beth… that was something small I changed for myself alone.”

“When we say small things change, we do not mean that they are insignificant.”

I took a long swig of beer to drown the lump in my throat. “I guess I’m staying here, then.” The realization was bittersweet: I would miss the twenty-first century, but I felt at home here in ways I couldn’t entirely explain.

“My chambers are comfortable.” Soph touched my shoulder, and my heart skipped a beat. “You can stay with me for a while if you want.”

“You can be our next sacrifice!” Hugayr made it sound completely decided. She pulled out a scroll and flattened it in her lap. “Let’s figure out a job you could do as a member of the Timeless. How about… scribe? Gardener? Engineer? Assassin?”

“Wait, what? You have assassins?”

Hugayr looked concerned and showed Soph the scroll, written in Nabataean. “Did I translate that right?”

Soph squinted and made a seesaw wiggle with her hand. “You could perhaps say ‘killer’ or ‘defender’? But I think ‘assassin’ is probably the best word.”

I could still feel the weight of Elliot’s sword in my hands, and the way I’d known exactly how to sever his spine. Maybe that was why I belonged in the first century B.C.E. In Nabataean, there was a word for what I did best. There was actually a job that combined my skills as an academic and a murderer.

“I think I’d like to be an assassin.”

Hugayr smiled. “Great! We’ve really been needing one. Let’s schedule your sacrifice.”

As you may have noticed, this book is an alternate history. But many of the events and people in it are based on ones that existed in our timeline. Here is a comprehensive list of facts and sources for anyone who wants to see how deep the wormhole goes.

The Ordovician period—which witnessed the biggest diversification of life on our planet—did end with a disaster that killed over 75 percent of all life on Earth. Two ice ages hit the planet in rapid succession (at least in geological time), turning those lush coastal ecosystems to ice. Nobody knows for sure how it happened, but physicist Adrian Melott and his colleagues have suggested a gamma ray burst ( https://www.nature.com/news/2003/030922/full/news030922-7.html).

Before the United States took control of California, the state was part of the Las Californias province, divided into Alta Californiato the north and Baja California to the south. First it was owned by Spain, then by Mexico. After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, Alta California was claimed by the United States and became a state in the union in 1850. Baja California was claimed by Mexico.

Flin Flonis an actual city on the border between Manitoba and Saskatchewan. After discovering copper there, a prospector named the city after a character in a pulp sci-fi novel he was reading, The Sunless City by J.E. Preston Muddock.

Harriet Tubmanwas a Civil War hero, leader of the underground railroad, activist, and escaped slave who almost certainly would have been elected to the Senate had women been given the vote at the same time freed slaves were. But in our timeline, she had to petition the government to receive the same pension granted to any man who fought in the Civil War as she had. After the Civil War, she lived in New York, where she ran one of the nation’s first elder care homes for African Americans. You can learn more about her extraordinary life in historian Catherine Clinton’s biography, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom .