Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

The Year of the Two-Headed Calf, 312. Mennias was Queen, but her famous wall was still years away from breaking ground. The local language was so far removed from Mika’s that she had to haggle by sketching numbers in the sand with sticks.

In 1520 the cityscape was so terrifying and unrecognizable that Mika never even landed. In 415 Maelstrom was in ruins, on the cusp of being repopulated by Mika’s northern ancestors.

The Year of the Candlemaker, 702. The Year of the Usurper, 139. Back and forth she sailed, feverishly charting the stars, the tides, the scents and colors and speed of the timestream, desperate to unlock a pattern that would guide her home. And if it really was all chaos? If the only way home was through sheer luck? Then she would roll, and roll, and roll again, until her number came up. Mika sailed and sailed, ’til the years blurred together and she hardly remembered the feel of earth beneath her feet or fresh water on her skin. Four times she encountered the trio of waterspouts, and four times she skipped off their turbulence a little too early, landing two hundred years out, one hundred years out, wrong and wrong and wrong again but circling closer with every attempt.

And there was a pattern. There was a complicated interplay between the season, the weather, the orientation of the stars, the migratory pattern of whales, and the duration of time spent in the stream. As Mika’s data piled up, her predictive models grew more precise. Now, with a bit of careful observation, she could predict the arrival of forward- or back-leaning currents down to a window of a few days.

She began to wait for optimal conditions rather than leap into the first timestream she found. The waits were painful, notching endless additional days in her travel log, but she knew she was on the verge of success. In every era she anchored, she resupplied, and she returned to the sea, a grim and sun-weathered figure in faded, salt-crusted clothing, eating little and speaking less.

Mika haunted the port of Maelstrom like a restless ghost.

Fourteen years, eight months, eleven days. It was the Year of the Lion’s Head, 72, and Mika had been anchored for three solid months. She had avoided more than a dozen timestreams, patiently waiting for this one. Late afternoon. Sleepwhale breeding season. The Mad Horse ascendant. A jump of four hundred sixty-five years would require a long plunge, by her calculations more than twenty minutes.

The clouds formed dense and low and black, just as she had expected. Bubbles appeared on the water’s surface in sporadic bursts and small waves lapped at the hull. Visibility was low through the drizzly haze, but Mika spotted the first hints of a funnel forming in the cloud layer.

She raced after the growing waterspout, exultant at the sight of two more funnels overhead. One had already touched the surface, visible only as she approached. And yes—yes! The water was dotted with neon-green kantamimes, carnivorous algae transplanted there in the fifth century, a menace by the sixth. Mika fought increasingly choppy waves and breathed deep of the ocean spray: yeasty and inviting. Like warm bread.

“I’m going home!” she shouted. The words tore at her throat, hoarse and startling. “I’m going home, and you can’t stop me!”

She knifed into the dark space between waterspouts before the third one touched down. The seductive flow of a timestream caught her boat, threatening to run her into the waves, and she fought to maintain her position. She had come this far before and always been tossed out too early.

Not again.

Green and yellow lights glimmered ahead. She was close. She only had to stay in these waters another ten minutes. Ten minutes without hitting a spout, or a behemoth—

Or the whirlpool forming dead ahead. Mika tried to course-correct, but she was penned in by the spouts and she refused to drop out of the stream, not now, not after coming this far. She skirted the lip of the whirlpool, her boat surrounded by peppery froth and rattling so hard she thought it would break at the seams.

She tilted, tilted—

Two tentacles slithered up the side of the boat, each one nearly a foot in diameter, mottled blue and red, pulsating with the glowing ichor in their veins. A midspace cephalopod. Mika stabbed at the questing limbs with her harpoon but she couldn’t reach them unless she abandoned the helm. She clung tight to the wheel and watched a tentacle wrap tight around the mast, watched the wood shatter into splinters, watched her sails and rigging crash to the deck in a broken tangle. The body of the beast dragged at the boat, tipping her toward whatever grasping toothy maw waited beneath the surface.

She felt it when the hull cracked and water flooded in below. Mika spun around the edges of the whirlpool, faster and faster, whipping past waterspout, waterspout, waterspout, crying for her faithful boat, her thoughts a blur of Keira Emry Bowen Terrewyn Keira Emry Bowen Terrewyn—

The timestream snapped with a sound like falling glass. It spat her out atop the shattered front half of her fishing boat, struggling and sinking fast. Mika unbuckled and jumped overboard before the wreck could suck her under, swimming hard, almost laughing with incredulity—twenty-five years a fisherwoman, and how often did she have to swim?

It took all her strength to reach the shore, and by the time Mika felt sand beneath her fingers, she was so exhausted that she half thought it a trick of her mind. She crawled the last yards, looking up at a city blurred around the edges.

She knew that skyline. She knew those spires, those painted bricks, that stained glass—

Her heart twisted, threatened to break. A slim figure was running down the beach, and his clothing was familiar, too, but for all the wrong reasons.

“The year, the year, what’s the year?” she cried, praying that she was wrong, her memories faulty.

He skidded into the surf beside her, breathing hard. “The Year of the Oak,” he said. “626.”

Too far. Months of waiting and her boat in ruins and she had jumped too far. The boy tried to take her arm, eagerly asking, “Mika? Is that your name? Are you Mika Sandrigal?” but she was crying too hard to answer.

It was Kendrall, of course, who had asked the men of the storm-watch tower to keep an eye out for her friend. Just in case. The last ten years had been kind to the nurse, adding a few more lines around her eyes and a few streaks of silver to her hair. Mika, sun-sick and heartsick, once again relied on the tender ministrations of her friend, and it wasn’t until Mika was well again in body, if not in spirit, that Kendrall took her by the hand and said, “Come outside with me, Mika. I have something for you.”

“I need to sleep,” Mika said thickly, depression wrapped like cotton batting around her tongue.

“You’ve slept enough. Come along.” Kendrall led her outside and up the road, into butter-yellow sunshine and the cheerful ruckus of a city letting out for lunch. They walked to the beach, to a quiet pedestrian bridge overlooking clear waters, and watched the tide roll in.

In her soothing bedside voice, Kendrall said, “I don’t think anyone in the history of Maelstrom has traveled as far as you have, Mika. What you’ve done is incredible. Inspiring. I’ve often wondered: would I have done the same, when my children were young? I’d like to think so, but… well, you just don’t know, do you?”

Mika pulled her hand from Kendrall’s. Suspicion was an ice dagger to the chest. “Why are you telling me this?” she demanded.

Tears shone in her eyes, but Kendrall didn’t sound a bit sorry when she said, “I looked you up in the book.”

“No.” Mika took a step back.

“I didn’t think I would see you again. I had to know—”