Marilyn Peake - The Other

I said, “No, Mary, I can’t.”

She said, “We should leave at night den. It’s da only way. Knock three times on mah door, so’s I know it’s you.”

Waylon moved the chair. He opened the door a sliver and peeked out. Then he opened it wider and led the way back outside. I followed, shutting the door behind me.

We walked in silence until we reached the edge of the forest. Then we slipped under the cover of leaves and shadows and walked to our pod.

Waylon said, “I’m not sure you should heal her.”

I said, “Law of Noninterference, right?”

He said, “Yes.”

I explained my reasoning. “The amendment to the original law states that in the event that a time traveler needs to save their own life or the life of a fellow traveler or needs to bring back the dead body of a traveler, they are to use their judgment regarding the law. Right?”

Waylon lifted his arm to move a branch out of his way. He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Those rules were made before actual time travel started. It comes out of the Theory of the Multiverse. It’s just a theory. No one knows if it’s true or not. We’ll know more as we run missions. In the meantime, think about it. By simply showing ourselves to people, we’re changing their lives. And yet figuring out who we can trust and interacting with them is a part of this mission that we’re on right now. Mary thinks we’re angels. What if she becomes a preacher because of that? Then we’ve changed her life in a significant way by just showing up and letting her see us. Now what if she becomes a preacher and changes someone else in some significant way? Then the multiverse could be changed even more. I think that as long as we don’t move her to a different time-space, we’re obeying the basic idea behind the Theory of the Multiverse.”

Waylon said, “We’ll do it your way. All of this gets reviewed by the TTA when we get back home, anyway. Everything’s subject to evaluation after missions are run and data collected.”

After returning to our pod, we recorded the events that had just taken place and rested until dark.

When night fell, we left our ship. The moon was bright enough to light our way. Passing by the lake, I remembered that Waylon and I had planned to go swimming. That would not happen now. We made our way through the woods to the edge of the plantation property. We batted biting insects away from our faces. They were so incredibly annoying, I felt glad they had all gone extinct.

The lights were on in the main house. No one seemed to be outside. The grounds were quiet except for the incessant night chatter I knew to be frogs and toads and insects.

We made our way down to Mary’s cabin. I jumped when a horse whinnied. We moved farther into the shadows, but no one appeared.

When we finally reached the cabin, Waylon knocked on the door three times. He did it so quietly, I wasn’t sure Mary would hear it.

The door opened a crack. Mary was wearing a striped cotton dress. It must have been painful for her to have taken off the nightgown and put it on. She looked pretty in it.

A smile flickered over her face as she stepped outside.

In silence, we snuck around the side of the barn and hurried to the edge of the forest. Then we stepped into the leafy coolness, appreciating the cover it would give us.

Mary said, “Look at da moonlight comin’ down through da trees. It makes the tip o’ da leaves silver. God made da world so beautiful, didn’t He?”

Waylon replied, “The world really is beautiful. Moonlight on trees is one of the most exquisite things I’ve ever seen.”

I wondered if we’d ever return Earth to this degree of richness and splendor. I could smell the dirt beneath our feet, the flowers that bloomed throughout the forest and on the plantation, pine trees somewhere nearby. Frogs and toads filled the night with their odd songs.

The world outside of enclaves like the TTA was brutal. Winds howled and blew parched dirt and sand into the air, turning it dark and gritty. The land that had been the United States—the land mass where the TTA is located—had shrunk in size centuries earlier when areas along the coasts were drowned by rising seas. Enclaves all over the globe had it good. But the human population was increasing so rapidly, we’d soon outgrow that space. We had to become more aggressive, and without the use of AgStim.

I felt a mild tremor in my hands and a quick run of heartbeats from the injection I’d given myself earlier. It wasn’t much, just enough to allow me to risk possible violation of the Law of Noninterference, my own and Waylon’s lives, and the lives of the people we were trying to help in another space-time location.

Our people were going to have to get a whole lot more aggressive, though, to push beyond the comfort of our peaceful enclaves. We were going to have to experiment with terraforming Earth’s dead regions, hoping it doesn’t backfire somehow and wipe us all out. And there are plans to try once again to establish a Mars colony. The thinking is that eventually Earth will die and the best chance for human survival is to inhabit more than one planet.

Mary needed help walking on the dead tree crossing the stream, so I supported her by placing my hands under her arms from behind and guiding her across. She winced when my fingers accidentally touched her back.

The moonlight lit tiny waves rippling over stones and branches. Fireflies blinked on and off throughout the forest and all along the stream.

It was a beautiful night, yet we found ourselves in the midst of human-created ugliness.

When we got to the place where we had landed our ship, Mary stood still. She put her hands to her mouth, as though trying to stifle her words or the amount of shock she was experiencing. She said, “You came down from da heavens in dis?”

I knew of the religion from her space-time. I said, “This is how we came here. We don’t have wings.”

Mary said, “You told me dat you’re an angel helper. Do da angels have wings?”

I said, “Yes. Yes, they do.” I had no idea about that, but better not to interfere with her belief system.

Waylon separated the panels that allowed entry into the pod.

I told Mary to follow him.

Extraordinarily trusting of us, she followed.

When we got inside, she marveled at everything. She had never seen furniture or utensils or tools like ours. She’d never seen holographic artwork. She’d never seen light that didn’t come from a natural source, never seen lamps that didn’t have flames flickering inside them. She accepted it all by believing that we were supernatural beings and these were simply manifestations of our extraordinary powers.

I led her to the medical bay. I asked her to remove her dress and any undergarment covering her back.

She cried as her dress and an underdress ripped more skin from her back.

When she’d completely exposed her back, I asked her to lie on her stomach on the treatment table. I explained the procedure she was about to go through. Heat and light would wash over her back. It would hurt, but it would sterilize and knit her skin together. It would be almost healed when we were done. Ointment would do the rest, and that would be soothing. I told her to keep her eyes closed.

Mary said, “I am ready.”

I moved to the edge of the room. I blinked to make my contact lenses shield my eyes and to turn down the amount of empathy I would feel, so that I could run the procedure through to the end.

I said, “I’m going to begin now.”

Mary shrieked as the light and heat covered her back and intensified streams of it moved up and down each and every laceration. She screamed for the entire duration of the treatment. At the end, when I could see on my contact lenses that the lacerations had knitted almost entirely together and the pus and infection were gone, I initiated the soothing part of the treatment. Ointment was sprayed along every gash where she had been whipped.