Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

She did not know the year.

Strange waters flowed beneath the hull of her fishing boat, illuminating the midnight darkness with phosphorescent swirls of yellow and green. The thick scent of pepper and brine tickled her nose, and she knew that a juggernaut swam far below, vast and merciless and consuming shield fish by the thousands.

Mika squinted up at a familiar night sky, at the Dancing Girl, the Triplets, the Mad Horse. She had fished off this coast for nearly twenty years, eight of them lost in time. She’d seen green waters, pink waters, blue. She’d been to Candorrea when it was a loose collection of fishing villages, and she’d been to Candorrea when the buildings were so tall she could hardly look at them without shaking. No matter what century she washed up in, however, the constellations were there to guide her home.

It was a windless night. Mika pulled out her oars and set course for Maelstrom, keen to find out when she had landed.

It was the Year of the Blade, 992. The city was metal and glass, its gleaming spires and brilliant rainbow lights casting a skyline like an oil painting. A dome was under construction on the southernmost hill, its name written in freestanding stone letters so large they were visible from the water: OCEANARIUM .

This was not her time, not even close.

Mika arrived shortly after the breakfast hour, when dockworkers and merchants were trickling down from the city in the hills. She bypassed the piers entirely, each of them far too tall for her little wooden boat, and glided into the sandy shallows at the north end of the dockworks.

She opened the fish hold in the middle of the deck and hauled out three large nets containing her catch. There were sixty pounds of rainbow-colored senfish, always popular; assorted deep-water crabs, all but one of them extinct since 646, if her Timeline of the Deeps was correct; and a single mammal, as large as a barrel-chested mountain dog and thick with hallucinogenic fat: the rare and lucrative sleepwhale.

She wasn’t the first fisherwoman-out-of-time they had encountered, and she wouldn’t be the last. The anachronism of a sixth-century fishing boat had caught the eye of every merchant on the north shore, and soon they came running, eager to beat one another to strange fish.

The sleepwhale went to a pair of glossy young researchers from the oceanarium. They wore white rubber gloves and green rubber boots, and Mika didn’t care one whit why they were taking the beast, but they seemed incapable of keeping their thoughts inside their heads.

“Gene mapping—”

“—reproduction—”

“—grafting the fat signature onto land-bound species—”

Mika understood one word in ten. She held up a hand and enunciated carefully. “Please. I will take the hardtack and beans, and a crate of apples, and be on my way.”

The young woman blinked at her owlishly, crouched beside the sleepwhale with one arm wedged under its fin. “You canny mean to weigh off so quick! We have questions—”

“No,” Mika said firmly. That word, at least, always remained the same.

After a bit of pleading and attempted bribery (a month’s worth of supplies—navigation tech—a warm bed for the night!), they let her go. She had been prepared to fight her way out, if necessary. She knew too well the avarice of researchers.

Researchers never stopped at questions. In their zeal for information they spouted theories, they babbled context, they shouted history and timelines and data and conclusions. Mika didn’t dare listen.

For eight years, she had avoided all knowledge of the late sixth century.

For eight years, she had avoided all knowledge of her children.

In the Year of the Mad Horse, 537, Keira was sixteen years old and waiting for her mother to return home from a fishing trip. She was a smart girl, bold and strong. If it hadn’t been for a lingering influenza, she would have been at the helm that morning, when a trio of waterspouts blocked Mika’s escape from the timestream.

In the Year of the Mad Horse, 537, Emry was fourteen years old. Bowen was eleven. Terrewyn was nine. They were each brilliant in their own way, Emry with numbers and Bowen with animals and Terrewyn already reading the stars. Their father was gone, his thread cut short in 532. They needed their mother to come home. They needed their mother.

Keira, Emry, Bowen, Terrewyn. Mika breathed their names every morning when she woke and every night before she fell asleep. If she was going to see them again, she had to keep going, no matter how long it took, no matter how exhausting, how difficult, how demoralizing.

It would have been nice to stay the night in 992, to cleanse the salt from her skin and the sway of the waves from her hips. But it wasn’t worth the risk. It was only a matter of time before Mika drew the attention of someone worse than a researcher. Like a politician.

Or a librarian.

It was the Year of the Sidewinder, 782. Maelstrom was well into the industrial age, boasting wrought-iron gaslights on every street corner and mechanical cargo lifters along every pier. Unlike the light and shine of the tenth century, this city crouched beneath a blanket of smog.

Mika saw far more of it than she’d intended, because she’d been caught. Succumbing to the lure of a hot meal, she had entered the nearest dining hall—and had the bad luck to sit next to a bureaucrat.

Petro had lacquered hair and a crisp tweed suit studded with silver medallions. He took one look at her sun-faded clothing and declared, “I certainly hope you haven’t just engaged in an unauthorized beach auction. I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”

He marched her into the hills with a pair of guards at her back, to a prison hotel built for the purpose of assimilating new citizens. Mika had landed in one of the guild eras, unfortunately, and clearly belonged to no guild.

It was a nice prison cell, at least, with fresh sheets and a writing desk and a folding screen to cover the privy. Mika spent three nights alone, charting what constellations she could see through her window, before Petro returned with his inevitable list of questions.

“Your name?”

“Jera.”

Petro’s eyes narrowed, but he neglected to challenge the lie. “Your boat is clearly sixth century,” he said, “—excellent condition, by the way—but there are patches to the hull, the rails, the equipment in the cockpit.”

Mika said, “Yes.”

“Some of these metals we have never encountered. They are forged in a manner our engineers declare impossible. You must have landed very far ahead, yes?” He stared at her, expectant, pen poised over a leather-bound notebook.

“I needed some repairs,” Mika admitted.

It was the wrong answer. “Tell me where you have been,” he demanded. “Past the ninth century? The tenth?”

Mika shook her head, mute, afraid to give away more than she already had.

Petro pursed his lips. He knocked on the door, three quick raps, and another young man wheeled in a heavy wooden cart draped with lush black velvet. Nestled in the fabric was an enormous codex, six inches thick and bound in fraying red leather.

The history book. Mika cringed and turned away.

“You know what this is,” Petro said. “You know we have questions.”

The other young man—a librarian, no doubt high-ranked to be handling a full copy—gently opened the book past the midway point. The thick pages crackled and wafted up the scent of old paper, tickling her nose, tempting her back. She kept her eyes trained firmly on a trailing length of velvet instead.

Now the questions rained down upon her, and Petro grew more flustered with every vague response. When did you conduct these repairs? What was the governing structure at the time? Did you, at any point, visit the library?