Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

The drones finished, and the jeeps were still far in the distance. M.J. always did drive damnably slow. Saki waved goodbye to jeeps that couldn’t see her. When they blinked back into the projection room, she was visibly shaken. Hyun-sik politely invited her to join him and Kenzou for dinner, but that would be awkward at best and she didn’t have the energy to make conversation. Saki kept it together long enough to get back to her quarters.

Safely behind closed doors, she called up the vid letter that M.J. had sent around the time she’d just visited. He was supposed to wait for her, only a few more months. She’d been so close. The vid played in the background while she cried.

We had a physical form, once. Wings and scales and oh so many legs, everything in iridescent blue. Each time we encounter a new love, it becomes a part of who we are. No, we do not blend our loves into one single entity—the core of us would be lost against such vastness. We always remain half ourselves, a collective of individuals, a society of linked minds. How could we exclude you from such a union?

The captain sent probes to the surface that were entirely inorganic—no synthetic rubber seals or carbon-based fuels—and this time the probes did not fail. They found nanites in the dust. Visits to the Chronicle were downgraded in priority as other teams worked to neutralize the alien technology. Saki tried to stay focused on her research, but without the urgency and tight deadlines, she found herself drawn into the past. She watched letters from M.J. in a long chain, one vid after the next. The hard ones, the sad ones, everything she’d been avoiding so that she could be functional enough to do research.

The last vid letter from M.J. was recorded not in his office but in the control room for the temporal projector. Saki had asked about it at the time, and he’d explained that he had one last trip to make, and the colony was running out of time. She’d watched it twice now, and M.J. looked so frail. But there was something Saki had to check. A hunch.

For the first half of the vid, M.J. sat near enough to the camera to fill nearly the entire field of view. He thought the plague was accelerating, becoming increasingly deadly. He talked about the people who had died and the people who were still dying, switching erratically between cold clinical assessment and tearful reminiscence. Saki cried right along with her lost love, harsh ugly tears that blurred her vision so badly that she nearly missed what she was looking for.

She paused and rewound. There, in the middle of the video, M.J. had gotten up to make an adjustment to the controls. The camera should have stayed with him, but for a brief moment it recorded the settings of the projector. The point in the record where M.J. was going.

Saki wrote down the coordinates of space and time. It was on New Mars, of course. It was also in the future. She studied the other settings on the projector, noting the changes he’d made to accommodate projection in the wrong direction.

M.J. had visited a future Chronicle, and left her the clues she needed to follow him.

She set her com status to do not disturb, and marked the temporal projector as undergoing maintenance. There was no way she could make it through a vid recording without falling apart, so she wrote old-fashioned letters to Kenzou, to her graduate students, to Li—just in case something went wrong.

When she stepped out into the corridor, Hyun-sik and Kenzou were there.

She froze.

“I will work the controls for you, Dr. Jones,” Hyun-sik said. “It is safer than programming them on a delay.”

“How did you—?”

“You love him, you can’t let him go,” Kenzou said. “You’ve always been terrible at goodbyes. You want to see as much of his time on the colonies as possible, and there’s no way to get approval for most of it.”

“Also, marking the temporal projector as ‘scheduled maintenance’ when our temporal engineer is in the middle of their sleep cycle won’t fool anyone who is actually paying attention to the schedule,” Hyun-sik added.

“Thinking of making an unauthorized trip yourself?” Saki asked, raising an eyebrow at her student.

“Come on.” Hyun-sik didn’t answer her question. “It won’t be long before someone else notices.”

They went to the control room, and Saki adjusted the settings and wiring to match what she’d seen in M.J.’s vid. The two young men sat together and watched her work, Kenzou resting his head on Hyun-sik’s shoulder.

When she’d finished, Hyun-sik came to examine the controls. “That is twenty years from now.”

“Yes.”

“No one has visited a future Chronicle before. It is forbidden by the IRB and the theory is completely untested.”

“It worked for M.J.,” Saki said softly. She didn’t have absolute proof that those distortion clouds in the Chronicle had been him, but who else could it be? No other humans had been here since the collapse, and whoever it was had selected expedition sites that she was likely to visit. M.J. was showing her that he had successfully visited the future. He wanted her to meet him at those last coordinates.

“Of course it did,” Kenzou said, chuckling. “He was so damn brilliant.”

Saki wanted to laugh with him, but all she managed was a pained smile. “And so are you. You’ll get into trouble for this. It could damage your careers.”

“If we weren’t here, would you bother to come back?”

Saki blushed, thinking of the letters she’d left in her quarters, just in case. M.J. had gone to some recorded moment of future. Maybe he had stayed there. This was a way to be with him, outside of time and space. If she came back, she would have to face the consequences of making an unauthorized trip. It was not so far-fetched to think that she might stay in the Chronicle.

“Now you have a reason to return,” Hyun-sik said. “Otherwise Kenzou and I will have to face whatever consequences come of this trip alone.”

Saki sighed. They knew her too well. She couldn’t stay in the Chronicle and throw them to the fates. “I promise to return.”

This is a love story, but it does not end with happily ever after. It doesn’t end at all. Your stories are always so rigidly shaped—beginning, middle, end. There are strands of love in your narratives, all neat and tidy in the chaos of reality. Our love is scattered across time and space, without order, without endings.

Visiting the Chronicle in the past was like watching a series of moments in time, but the future held uncertainty. Saki split into a million selves, all separate but tied together by a fragile strand of consciousness, anchored to a single moment but fanning out into possibilities.

She was at the site of the xenoarchaeology warehouse, mostly.

Smaller infinities of herself remained in the control room due to projector malfunction or a last-minute change of heart. In other realities, the warehouse had been relocated, or destroyed, or rebuilt into alien architectures her mind couldn’t fully grasp. She was casting a net of white into the future, disturbing the fabric of the Chronicle before it was even laid down.

Saki focused on the largest set of her infinities, the fraction of herself on New Mars, inside the warehouse and surrounded by alien artifacts. The most probable futures, the ones with the least variation.

M.J. was there, surrounded by a bubble of white where he had disrupted the Chronicle.

Saki focused her attention further, to a single future where they had calibrated their coms through trial and error or intuition or perhaps purely by chance. There was no sound in the Chronicle, but they could communicate.

“Hello, my lifelove,” M.J. messaged.

“I can’t believe it’s really you,” Saki answered. “I missed you so much.”