Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

At dawn, there were sprinkles. By afternoon, it was a steady downpour. Her spirits surged. There were few better opportunities for catching a timestream than the churned-up currents of a summer storm.

Mika sliced through the breakers with practiced ease, and then it was nothing but wind and salt for miles. She let the current whisk her away from the city and toward the storm cloud brewing black in the distance.

Soon the ocean was roiling beneath her, pitching her boat side to side like a ringtail hopper in the jaws of a redwolf. She reefed her sails and strapped herself to the helm, desperate for some sign of a back-leaning current.

When she saw it, she almost couldn’t believe her eyes: three waterspouts, barely visible in the reflected light of the deeps, but there, most definitely there. Mika steered toward the hot, swirling winds, hardly daring to hope that this might be her passage home.

Just as she touched the edge of the timestream—and yes, yes, that was the familiar scent, like warm bread—frenzied sea creatures knocked her boat from below and dark waters flooded the deck. A shadow-crusted behemoth crested over the starboard railing and slapped one meaty fin across her deck.

Mika reached into the storage space beneath the ship’s wheel and fumbled blindly at the buckles holding her fishing gear in place. There—yes! The harpoon. She spun to face the beast, weapon in hand, but the boat tipped, groaned, threatened to capsize under its weight—

And crashed portside down into the timestream.

She awoke in a warm room heavy with sunshine and the scents of cinnamon and clover. Her face was hot, her right arm swollen, her breath ragged like there was a sack of fluid in her chest. She was the sole inhabitant of a small infirmary. A woman with a kind face sat in a wicker chair beside her bed.

“What year?” Mika rasped.

“The Year of the Manticore, 616.” The woman smiled, setting aside a dog-eared book. “We found you a half-mile offshore with a fairly impressive bite out of the side of your boat. It’s been towed in, nothing our fishleaders can’t repair, but they’ll need a few more days. Take it as a blessing and get some rest. Here. Start with water.”

She handed a cup over and Mika drank her fill. The pause gave her time to swallow her disappointment, bitter and all-too-familiar. “How long have I been here?” she asked.

“In the infirmary? Four days. Based on your condition, perhaps another full day at sea before we found you.”

Mika sighed. Eight years, four months, and seventeen days since she left the year 537. Tears pricked her eyes. 616 was the closest she’d gotten yet, but it might as well have been 1616.

In 616, her children had been dead for decades.

“I’m Kendrall Millivar,” the woman offered.

Mika shoved her ruinous thoughts aside. Cautiously, she said, “My name is Jera.”

It was a quick-blooming friendship. Kendrall nursed her through the following week, determinedly battling the infection that had taken hold in Mika’s lungs. She kept Mika entertained with good-natured complaints about her three grown children, and in return Mika shared some of her exploits at sea.

Mika’s boat was not fully repaired by the time she was discharged, so Kendrall offered a temporary room in her own house. “No charge for a fisherwoman,” she said. “There’s a city fund to cover your essentials.”

One week turned into two, and two turned into a month. Mika’s boat was ready by the third week, but a bone-deep weariness had invaded her body in the wake of her illness. Eight years of hard sailing had left its mark, and Kendrall convinced her that a good rest now would serve her better in the long run.

It was far too easy to settle in. It was far too easy to let herself be surrounded by Kendrall’s family, Kendrall’s home, Kendrall’s happiness. The woman glided seamlessly back and forth between nursing and homemaking, and Mika saw what life could have been like if she hadn’t been so irrevocably drawn to the sea.

After one particularly long, warm evening of laughter and drink, Mika confessed her real name. After so many years of lonely caution, it was like a rock had cracked through the hull of her chest, and the entire story poured out: her home and her hope, her children, her fear. And Kendrall didn’t run off to the archives, or tell her it was futile, or ask for anything more than what was offered. She took Mika’s hands and said, “Tell me what you need.”

Kendrall wanted her to stay, though she didn’t say so aloud. She didn’t have to. Mika knew she could live comfortably in this century. Fisherwomen were well-regarded. Their livelihoods were supported, but their actions were autonomous. It was a time of peace, which she knew from her childhood history lessons would last at least twenty years past her lifespan. The cultural and linguistic changes from her own time were more curious than onerous. And there was Kendrall.

But every dawn, Mika marked the passage of time in her travel log with a grease pen. And every dawn, it seemed the wrinkles on her hands had deepened. How old would she be, when she finally made it home? Would she return to her children as their caretaker, or would they be forced to take care of her?

Keira, Emry, Bowen, Terrewyn. Her navigator, her mathematician, her biologist, her astronomer. Her babies.

Eight years, six months, twenty-two days, and Mika returned to the sea. Kendrall came to see her off, and Mika wasn’t ashamed to shed a few tears. “Say hello to your children for me,” Kendrall said, and Mika left the Year of the Manticore behind.

It took three days of sailing for Mika to catch a back-leaning current. On a warm evening, in the dim light of dusk, she spotted tendrils of pink light slithering up from the deep. They burst on the surface like air bubbles, releasing the sickly-sweet scent of tropical wildflowers.

She followed the lights north, and in their glimmer and flash she spotted untimely schools of fish flanking her hull. They were spiny beasts, gray and gruesome, slipping through the waves from an era long before humanity studded the coast. Each one would have been worth a small fortune in the sixth century, but she had no time to cast a net.

The timestream sucked her in with the force of a whirlpool and it took all of Mika’s skill to keep the craft upright. By the time she spun out again she was trembling with exhaustion but wholly, fiercely alive.

It took her until dawn to reach land. There were no mechanical cargo lifters, no buildings of metal and glass in the hills. In fact, there were no buildings at all, and no docks, either. A long, thatch-roofed pavilion stood on the lonesome beach, still smoldering from a recent fire.

Mika had gone too far.

She didn’t stay in the Pre-Mendorian era for long. If the stories were true, these hills were controlled by competing warrior bands—territorial at best, cannibals at worst. Archaeologists and anthropologists were divided on the subject, and she didn’t care to investigate on their behalf.

At night there were lights to guide her, those strange phosphorescent blooms that lived in the midspace between eras, native to none. Sailing was trickier by day, when the glare of the sun blinded her against multicolored hints from the deep, but a good fisherwoman trusted her nose over her eyes. She knew the sharp herbal scents of drifting leviathans, the floral pockets of midspace cilia, the burnt-rubber sharks and the sour lemon sleepwhales.

Mika drifted back and forth along the coastline until she caught the scent of black tar under a hardboiled sun, and then she turned her boat west, toward the future.

The Year of the Bat, 1127. There were more ships in the air than ships in the water, but as soon as Mika touched the beach, there were customers waiting, as always. Their food packaging was nearly as incomprehensible as their slang.