The Future of Another Timeline

^THIRTY-TWO TESS

Los Angeles, Alta California (2022 C.E.)… Raqmu, Nabataean Kingdom (13 B.C.E.)

The headache clamped down on my sinuses, drilled into my skull, and shot metal rods into my spine. And that was the easy part. When I stumbled out of the Machine at Raqmu in 2022 with Anita and Morehshin, I knew I wouldn’t be staying for long. The light blinded me and my memories split apart again, making it hard to figure out what I was doing from minute to minute. My past was like a wadded-up piece of paper, and it looked different every time I smoothed it out.

Somehow, with the help of a lot of painkillers, Anita got me to the little airport that would take us to Tel Aviv, then back to Los Angeles. We checked our mobiles to see whether anything was different. Morehshin borrowed a tablet from Anita, poked it for a while, then made a mewing sound. When she looked up, I could barely recognize her underneath the weepy smile. “The Comstock Laws… they were overturned in the 1960s.”

I swiped a search query into my mobile, flooded with disbelief and hope. I checked and rechecked what I found, to be sure I wasn’t misunderstanding what I read. Then I practically shouted, “Abortion is legal in almost every state!” For a few minutes my pain was gone and we hugged each other, laughing and making squee noises.

It didn’t last. I felt the throb of Beth’s life in my memories again, along with something else—the agony of her rejection that night at the show, worse than the pain of losing her to suicide. After too many ibuprofen, I was able to lie back on the plane and think about it. I’d turned my life around after Beth died, choosing nonviolence, swearing to make it up to her under my new name. In a way, I’d tried to become Beth. But now the clean burn of that motivation was engulfed in smoke. There was no sudden moment of realization, no wake-up call. Beth was still around to look accusingly at me in chem class during freshman year. Instead of setting out on a crusade, I’d wandered through a series of murky decisions that brought me here.

But as I’d told Anita before, my pain didn’t seem to come from holding those two histories in my mind. It was from holding two sets of feelings. The Tess whose best friend committed suicide knew who she was. She had a purpose. The Tess whose best friend lived felt… ambivalent about herself. Not all the time. She was happy, but always also sad about something. She’d built a new identity around an almost unbearable ambiguity, and the gradual realization that she would never be perfectly good or principled. This Tess would always know she had done bad things, and suffered the consequences. That was the awful new feeling scraping the inside of my skull: my best friend, whom I loved more than anyone at the time, had rejected me personally rather than rejecting life itself.

“Hey, Tess. We’re here. Do you want me to drive you home? You look like shit.” Anita shook me gently and I woke up at the Los Angeles airport to find the pain had not gone away at all.

“Yeah.” I popped another few ibuprofen. “The feeling I told you about before… it’s worse here.”

Anita guided me to her car, and we said goodbye to Morehshin. The geology department would put her in travelers’ housing. We promised to meet at the Daughters of Harriet meeting next week, when C.L. was reachable—we’d arrived in our present, during the timespan when they came back to research the machine data. Our present C.L. would be back in a few days, seconds after our past C.L. left.

I groaned as we got into Anita’s old Prius.

“It seems like it’s worse the closer you are to our present.” She was thinking aloud. “Did it hurt this much in 1894?”

“No. It was uncomfortable, but not like this.” I stumbled after her through the parking lot. Sunlight was painful, and everything I looked at left a neon stain on my vision.

“Did it hurt in Raqmu when we went back to the fourth century B.C.E.?”

“No. I mean, a very tiny bit, once in a while. But not really. And nothing in the Ordovician.”

Anita raised an eyebrow. “That’s interesting.”

I was barely able to manage the seat belt fastener. “I really hope I don’t have to go live in the Ordovician.”

Back at my apartment, everything was maddeningly the same as when I left. I’d only been gone about four days in real time. Flopping on the couch, all I wanted to do was drown in the comfort of musical nostalgia. Squinting at my phone, I poked my streamer app and hunted for Grape Ape’s rare EP, the one with “See the Bitches” on it. That was weird. It wasn’t listed in my collection. Nor were any Grape Ape albums. I wondered if there’d been some annoying dispute with the streaming service that meant I’d have to get some other app if I wanted to listen to Grape Ape online. I didn’t have the energy to investigate, so I knelt down next to the cabinet with my record collection. I’d gotten a new turntable and this was an excellent chance to try it out.

None of my Grape Ape albums were there.

Had somebody broken in and stolen them? I suppose they were worth a little money—I had a few collector’s items, but only for that small subset of people who cared about feminist punk of the early 1990s. I rocked back on my heels, wondering if I’d stashed all my Grape Ape albums somewhere else during a fit of cleaning that might have been years ago in travel time. But then a terrible feeling started to grow in my gut.

I searched for Grape Ape online and found only references to a cartoon from the 1970s about a giant purple ape and his tiny dog friend. No matter what search terms I used, nothing came up. No Glorious Garcia, either.

Somehow, an orthogonal deletion had eliminated Grape Ape from the timeline.

I didn’t care if the neighbors heard me screaming.

A week later, the Daughters met at Anita’s house. We didn’t bother with preliminaries, and instead gave the floor to C.L., who made a full report on how we’d saved the Machine. It was their first time presenting a formal edit, and they had overprepared in the best possible way, giving us a nicely formatted dataset with a clear explanation of how to extract and analyze any slice you might want. To be fair, the news was so good for our project that they could have dumped a malformed smear of numbers with no metadata and we probably would have cheered.

And then I said the words I’d dreamed about for so long. “I remember a timeline where abortion was illegal.”

“So do I,” Anita said.

“Me too,” C.L. added.

“Holy shit.” Enid stared at us. “All of you remember a timeline where abortion was illegal in 2022?”

“It’s still technically not legal at the federal level. States have their own laws,” Shweta grumbled.

“But there’s no real enforcement,” Berenice noted. “And it’s only a couple of states.”

I spoke firmly. “It was illegal everywhere. All over the U.S.”

Morehshin broke in. “Women were dying. Men genetically engineered them to become breeders or workers. There was a whole biotech industry devoted to female containment and maintenance, and they had recently invented a way to replace a queen’s head with a—” She stopped abruptly when she noticed C.L.’s look of horror. “Sorry. I shouldn’t bring that up. That is not our timeline anymore. It is merely what I remember.”

Everyone fell into an awkward silence.

Anita popped open a bottle of sparkling pomegranate juice. “We won the edit war!”

“A toast to Harriet Tubman!”

“Long live her daughters!”

“And her mothers!”

“And her nonbinary kin!”

I stood up to raise a glass, felt a wrenching agony in my sinuses, and everything buzzed into dark static.

“Tess, I am taking you back to the Temple at Raqmu. I think Hugayr might know what to do.”

I was lying on Anita’s inflatable guest bed in her study. The lights were off, and I could see the last shreds of sunset through the window facing her garden. As long as I didn’t move a single muscle, the pain eased. But when I had to shift a little or stretch my neck to see something, it would all come roaring back. There was no point in arguing with Anita. I would do anything to stop feeling this way.

“Somebody will have to take over my lab. And finish teaching my class for this quarter.”

“Don’t worry about that yet. With any luck, we’ll be back in a few days.”

I slept most of the way to Raqmu, trying to outrun the agony with cannabis tinctures. We had to go through the Machine separately, and the only unburned time when we could arrive within minutes of each other was three years after we’d left Soph at the Temple.

It was my first trip since we’d shut down Elliot’s operation, and it was smooth. When I knelt to feel the water rise, there was a burst of humid air and the unmistakable smell of soil that had been chemically altered by plants and animals for millions of years. It was the planet I knew—the one with angiosperms and tetrapods and pterygota. The one where both land and water sustained life. I wondered how many times C.L. and their colleagues had gone back to repair the damage in the Ordovician, and if they’d learned more about the interface. I might never know.

When I emerged in 13 B.C.E., my entire body sang with relief. As an administrator from the Order noted my name and mark, I stretched my neck and arms to enjoy the tingle of motion without agony. I felt like myself again. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that my new self—whoever she turned out to be—didn’t hurt as much.

The temple was just as I remembered it, surrounded by a lush garden and artificial pools. A young adept brought Soph to meet me in the entrance hall, two scrolls and a writing box tucked under her arm.

“You caught me in the middle of afternoon study.” She smiled. Her hair was pinned up in the style of the late nineteenth century, and she wore the simple linen tunic preferred by most women who lived here. “Have you come to visit?”

“I’m meeting Anita. We need to talk to Hugayr about something that I’ve done to the timeline.”

Soph’s eyes widened but she said nothing. “I can take you to Hugayr’s office, but I have to warn you. She’s not in a good mood.”

I recalled how she ordered her students around and shrugged. “I’ve dealt with tenure committees, so I think I’m prepared.”

It had been three years for Soph, and only a few weeks for me, so we had a lot of asymmetric catching up to do. Now fluent in spoken Nabataean, Soph had made herself indispensable to the temple. She started by translating a few manuscripts, but quickly moved on to writing interpretive treatises about how the goddess should be honored in everyday life. Visiting scholars had copied her work to take back to their own libraries across the Mediterranean.

“It’s similar to what I wrote back in my present, but here they take it a lot more seriously.” She had a note of pride in her voice. “And it doesn’t get you sent to jail, which is nice.”

“I’m so glad we got you out of that shithole, Soph.”

She sighed. “I miss it, though. I miss Aseel and my other friends. I miss my parlors. I miss gin. I even miss the smell of the river!”

I put my arm around her and squeezed. “Aseel is doing great—she’s running Sol’s sheet music business. I’ve never seen her so happy. And busy!” Then I told her about the dance contest that changed the Comstock Laws, and Morehshin’s sister from the future, and how C.L. had data so good they were sure to get published in Nature Geoscience, or maybe Nature proper. It was a big breakthrough for understanding the origins of the interface. “We changed the timeline, you know. We won the edit war.”

Soph stopped me on the threshold of the chamber with the three-faced goddess statue. “One thing I’ve learned while studying here, Tess. There is no end to the edit war, and we can never claim victory. The timeline is always changing. So are we. I think perhaps… all we can hope for are small mercies. One life spared. One good deed. Do you understand?”

I searched the pale blue of her eyes, wondering if she knew more than she let on. “Anita always says that small things change, and big things don’t.”

“She’s right.”

When we knocked on Hugayr’s office door, one of her students opened it right away. Over her shoulder, I could see that Anita was already there, deep in conversation.

“Oh hello, come in!” Hugayr gestured us to some cushions around a small table made from bronze and wood. Then she glared at the student. “You—bring us some beer, and then get back to work on your manuscript. It’s showing some promise.”

The student hurtled out of the room, a tiny smile of accomplishment on their face, and returned with ceramic mugs of a foamy drink that smelled like barley and pepper. I sipped experimentally. Didn’t taste exactly like beer from my present, but close enough.

Hugayr put her mug down. “Tess, I have already told Anita. You can’t go home. It will kill you.”

I panicked, overwhelmed. “There’s nothing we can do?”

“We have other Timeless here who have experienced the same thing. When you edit your own life, it can be very painful. Not for everyone. Some people—they do an edit, get their loved one back, and live happily ever after. Some people feel only a little discomfort and then it goes away. But you are one of those unfortunate people who is completely fucked.”

“Why me? All I did was bring a loved one back, like you said.”

Hugayr wore a dubious expression. “Anita told me what you did. You created a highly divergent timeline. You edited your entire adult life all at once. Of course it made you sick. Didn’t you think about that before you did it?”

“Well, yeah… but it seemed like it was going okay until…”

“Until the edit actually took?”

I picked at a sliver of wood on the table leg. “I don’t get it. That was supposed to be a small change. But we made a huge change to women’s rights and abortion law, and nobody else is sick. Shouldn’t that have changed all our lives profoundly?”

“What is abortion?” Hugayr glanced at Soph for clarification.

“Ending a pregnancy.”

“I see. You changed some laws made by men. Yes. Did you change any women’s lives?”

“I guess… I changed Beth’s life.”

Anita scratched her head. “We changed Kitty’s life, I think.”

“Did either of those women’s lives change specifically because of what you did to men’s law?”

“They were two of the millions of women whose lives were changed. Reproductive rights improve our choices, give us freedom, allow us to follow new paths… it was a profound alteration of history.” I trailed off when Hugayr gave me the frown she usually reserved for students.

“Think. Why would you feel a big change less than a small one?”

I thought about all those people linking arms to protest Comstock at the Expo, the dancers at Sherry’s, Sol’s strategic carnival wisdom, and the Four Hundred on their thrones. “It was collective action. So many of us worked to change the laws that the effects are spread out and attenuated. I guess all of us feel it a tiny bit. But with Beth… that was something small I changed for myself alone.”

“When we say small things change, we do not mean that they are insignificant.”

I took a long swig of beer to drown the lump in my throat. “I guess I’m staying here, then.” The realization was bittersweet: I would miss the twenty-first century, but I felt at home here in ways I couldn’t entirely explain.

“My chambers are comfortable.” Soph touched my shoulder, and my heart skipped a beat. “You can stay with me for a while if you want.”

“You can be our next sacrifice!” Hugayr made it sound completely decided. She pulled out a scroll and flattened it in her lap. “Let’s figure out a job you could do as a member of the Timeless. How about… scribe? Gardener? Engineer? Assassin?”

“Wait, what? You have assassins?”

Hugayr looked concerned and showed Soph the scroll, written in Nabataean. “Did I translate that right?”

Soph squinted and made a seesaw wiggle with her hand. “You could perhaps say ‘killer’ or ‘defender’? But I think ‘assassin’ is probably the best word.”

I could still feel the weight of Elliot’s sword in my hands, and the way I’d known exactly how to sever his spine. Maybe that was why I belonged in the first century B.C.E. In Nabataean, there was a word for what I did best. There was actually a job that combined my skills as an academic and a murderer.

“I think I’d like to be an assassin.”

Hugayr smiled. “Great! We’ve really been needing one. Let’s schedule your sacrifice.”