The Future of Another Timeline

^SEVEN TESS

Chicago, Illinois (1893 C.E)

I’d been working at the Algerian Theater for two weeks when Aseel announced that we’d have a rare night off. She told the men they could take advantage of an offer from the Expo bosses, who promised bonus pay to laborers willing to work through the night on construction. The women filtered out to Cairo Street, where dozens of Egyptian entertainers were cooking up real dinners in their fake homes.

I was on my way to the brand-new industrial wonder known as the L train when Aseel caught up to me. “What are you doing tonight?”

“I’m going home to get some supper.”

“Soph and I are going to see Lucy Parsons speak. Do you want to come?”

I was torn. Like anyone who studied this period, I knew the anarchist Lucy Parsons. In just over a decade, she would found the Industrial Workers of the World, known to cowering bosses and idealistic unionists as the IWW or Wobblies. Seeing her in person would be a thrill. But it would also, inevitably, be a disappointment. I’d learned that the hard way, after meeting some of my heroes among the anarchists of New York a decade before. I really hoped Aseel and Soph weren’t entangled in the sectarian garbage fire of this decade’s socialist politics.

“Are you interested in joining Parsons’s movement?” I asked.

Aseel shrugged. “I like women who can make an auditorium full of men listen to them. I’ll attend to what she has to say before deciding.”

I laughed. “That’s a good reason to see Lucy Parsons.” I agreed to come along, and we linked arms as we strolled. If nothing else, I could use this lecture as a chance to gather legit academic data about the founder of the IWW. We had to maintain the facade of the Applied Cultural Geology Group, and I couldn’t exactly return to 2022 and report to our funders that all I’d done was wage an edit war.

The lecture hall was packed with Chicago’s finest rabble-rousers and intellectuals. Lucy Parsons was one of the most famous anarchists in the country, and her speeches were legendary. Her writing burned up the pages of The Alarm, and she’d founded a new anarchist publication here in Chicago called simply Freedom. She was always getting arrested for her articles, especially after publishing a simple recipe for TNT because she believed everyone should know how to make bombs. A few years earlier, the state had executed her husband for his role as a supposed bomb-thrower during the Haymarket Riot. Parsons suffered for the cause, and radicals loved her for it. Besides, anarchy was having a moment. Banks were closing around the world, unemployment was spiking, and the Chicago steelworkers had led a successful strike. Parsons and her comrades seemed to have the right medicine for an ailing nation.

Soph met me and Aseel in the back of the hall, where we added our cigarette smoke to the general haze overhead. When Parsons strode onto the stage, plain black dress buttoned to her throat, her charisma was palpable. She didn’t wait for an introduction, and she gave no preamble. Even without a microphone, we could hear her voice booming: “I AM AN ANARCHIST!” She pushed a lock of tight curls behind her ear and continued, her tan face luminous with determination. “Today we are celebrating a victory for labor in this city. Boss Burnham has agreed to a minimum wage for Expo workers, and is granting overtime pay on nights and Sundays. We forced him to agree to overtime on Labor Day!”

Cheers erupted, and I looked around at the room. Workers still reeking of the stockyards rubbed elbows with tweedy professors. New Women passed flasks of gin to governesses. A lady in a fancy French dress took rapid shorthand notes in her stenographer’s notebook.

“I am an anarchist, but that does not mean I carry bombs. I carry something the capitalists and politicians know is far more dangerous. A vision of freedom from their rule! Freedom from life on the street, from starvation, and from work that is meaner than slavery!” Parsons passed her level gaze over the whole room, taking our measure, absorbing the cries of her fans. “We cannot stop with this one victory. The city of Chicago murders anarchists! We need to fight for justice now more than ever!”

Watching her reminded me of what I felt when I was at that Grape Ape show. Cheers and chants erupted all over the hall, and I could feel a new sense of purpose flooding through all of us—including the cynics like me. Maybe I’d been wrong to say that Parsons wasn’t helping to build a better world. She wasn’t perfect, as I knew well from working with the anarchist movement. But without her call for direct action, my present day might have looked very different. When the politicians ignored us, and the capitalists strangled us, we could always link arms like the IWW and refuse to comply.

After the lecture, Soph fanned herself. “Well! I need a drink after that.”

“Let’s go to your parlors!” Aseel jumped up and down. I almost did too. I hadn’t been inside Soph’s rooms yet, and I was dying to see her Spiritualist headquarters. It was like that high school feeling of heading to a friend’s house when her parents were gone, so we could drink their bad liqueur and listen to music. Then I remembered my last look at high school life, blood dribbling from that old car, and was consumed with regret.

We passed the door to my room like all the other Spiritualists did, and entered Soph’s place through a parlor with some wooden chairs and a coat rack. Double pocket doors opened into a high-ceilinged living room—though temporal locals would probably call it a sitting room. I was surprised to discover it wasn’t jammed with Ouija boards and crystal balls atop velvet draperies. Instead there were overstuffed pillows, fainting couches, chairs, sofas, and an archipelago of coffee tables stretching across a thick fur rug. Streetlamps outside provided dim illumination through two ample window seats, also piled with fur and pillows.

“Let me light the lamps and get some glasses.” Soph put a match beneath a couple of glass fixtures on the wall and slowly the rest of the room came into view. There were several display nooks, clearly designed for knickknacks, which Soph had crammed with books and pamphlets. Two carved wooden vanities were shoved together against one wall; one was repurposed as a writing desk, and the other held dozens of tiny glass bottles, pocket mirrors, and small boxes inlaid with ivory. Pulling a key ring from a pocket in her skirts, Soph knelt to unlock a cabinet in the latter, from which she withdrew three glasses and a bottle of gin. A lock of blond hair slid from her updo, and it briefly curled into the shape of a question mark before settling on her shoulder.

“Please don’t tell me you want sherry.” Soph gave me a sideways glance.

“Fuck no. I love gin.”

“Thank the goddess for that!” Soph laughed as she poured generous slugs and raised her glass in a toast. “Here’s to freedom.” We clinked and drank. I thought of the fancy gin bar in my neighborhood back home, where all the Silver Lake hipsters went to sample the spirits made with locally sourced juniper. On weekend afternoons, I sometimes met Anita there to talk about research, politics, and everything else in our lives. As I tasted Soph’s gin, I had a vivid recollection of Anita’s “no more fucks to give” face as we dissected the motives of that douchebag on the geoscience department hiring committee, whining about how diversity had gone too far. What I loved most about Anita was the stubborn way she refused to describe setbacks as failures. Several years ago, Berenice was denied tenure because, according to the committee, they couldn’t count her postdoctoral work because it had been written under her deadname. We’d gone out drinking to commiserate with her. “Every edit is an invitation to edit again,” Anita said. “The shitballs will never win as long as history can be revisited.” We’d been talking about the timeline, but it gave Berenice an idea. She sued the tenure committee for discrimination, and now she was the first tenured trans woman in our department. At least, she had been. Fuck. I thought of Enid, who had sworn at our last meeting to save Berenice. Had she succeeded? Was Anita drinking with her and Berenice upstream? Suddenly, I missed my friends so much that my chest ached.

I gulped the rest of my drink and set the glass down more forcefully than I intended. I needed to find out where my new friends stood. Were we merely drinking buddies, or were we going to get serious and do some edits? “So what do you ladies think about Lucy Parsons? I thought she gave a damn good show.”

“I admire her. But I think there are a lot of struggles that she ignores.” Soph gestured around her parlors. “We need liberation from the government in our homes, too.”

Aseel nodded and poured us another round. “Back in Arizona, I heard about Lucy Parsons from some folks who knew her in Texas. They said she used to be a slave. But she won’t admit it! If anyone asks, she says she has ‘a touch of Spanish blood.’ She’s passing as white. I don’t understand how she can say she wants freedom for all when she won’t even admit what her real background is. I mean, a lot of people would benefit from seeing a colored lady telling white men what to do.”

“Are you talking about Sol?” Soph laughed.

“No!” Aseel frowned. “I mean, yes, but also all of them. All the men.”

“It’s not exclusively men who are the problem, though,” Soph replied. “There was a letter in the Tribune from the Lady Managers Association about how it was a mistake to give former slaves the vote along with white women. I guess their candidate is running on some kind of de-abolitionist platform.”

“Why doesn’t Lucy Parsons talk about that white suffragette crap?” Aseel took another drink and looked like she was going to smash something. “Thank goodness for Senator Tubman.”

I raised my glass. “Cheers to Senator Harriet Tubman!” We all drank another shot, and I was suffused with drunken love for these two women, fighting alongside the Daughters of Harriet without realizing it. But I wasn’t here to revel in intersectional sisterhood across the centuries. I was too old to spend years in the past, tentatively building a network of sympathetic allies. I needed to find out right now whether Aseel and Soph were on my side. And the only way to find out was to gossip.

“You know who is absolutely the worst? Emma Goldman. I worked with her in New York a few years ago, and she was…” I searched for the right words but was too tipsy for nuance. “She was an asshole. Love her writing, she’s a big inspiration to me, but what a mess. She’s obsessed with using violence to change history. Remember that whole thing where she sent her boyfriend to kill Henry Frick? I mean, first of all, that was a terrible idea. The press was already destroying Frick for sending Pinkertons to kill strikers. We were winning! And then she decides it’s time to send her completely useless boyfriend to kill him? On top of everything else that’s awful about that idea, she couldn’t do it herself?”

“I read about that in the paper.” Aseel made a face. “Didn’t he shoot Frick twice, and then stab him? And he still couldn’t kill the guy? What was his name again? Emma’s boyfriend?”

“Sasha Berkman.” I smacked my forehead as I thought about him again. A hot intellectual bad boy—though definitely erring on the side of hotness rather than intellect. “A couple of strikers actually saved Frick from Sasha. That’s how bad it was. Our own people protected a murdering boss from being murdered.”

Soph nodded sympathetically. “I like her ideas about free love, but violence is always the wrong way forward.”

That gave me a pang of relief. I couldn’t team up with people who liked to watch things burn. Unless those things happened to be cigarettes. Soph extracted some tobacco and papers unsteadily from a drawer and returned to flop on a pillow. We smoked silently for a minute, looking up at the wriggling rings of light cast on the ceiling from the lamps’ glass globes.

“Nobody hates Emma Goldman more than Lucy Parsons. And vice versa.” Aseel’s tone hung between annoyed and amused. “Their war is endlessly nauseating.” It seemed like she’d been following this particular political train wreck closely, but didn’t like the infighting. That was a good sign too.

“Regale us with all the sordid details, my dear.” Soph rolled over on her back, buoyed by pillows, and looked at us upside-down.

Aseel swirled her gin and batted her eyelids theatrically. “Well. So, a few years ago, Emma started publishing articles about how women should be permitted to enjoy sex the same way men do. You know all about that, darling.” She winked at Soph and I felt a twinge of jealousy. Travel is always a lonely business, and I wanted to be a part of their easy rapport. I wanted to trust them. But what would they say if they knew who I really was?

Aseel continued her story. “After a while, that Puritanical dingus Anthony Comstock got Emma arrested on indecency charges. So Emma demanded that Lucy write a testimonial supporting her as a fellow anarchist. But instead Lucy published an article about how sex shouldn’t be part of the revolution, and that free love is a distraction from the fight for workers’ rights. Of course Emma had to write her own article about how Lucy has lost sight of the true nature of liberty. I couldn’t be bothered to read the awful thing Lucy wrote in reply, and what Emma wrote after that.”

That sounded like Emma. After years of working with her, I knew she was always surrounded by a blast radius of toxic drama. She was doing good work. But she also loved to pit her friends and followers against each other, demanding unreasonable loyalty, or seducing people then going cold. She played so many power games in her personal life that it was hard for me to believe she truly wanted to abolish power structures.

Soph leaned on her elbows and flicked ash onto a dainty shell plate. “Maybe Lucy enjoys the publicity because she wants more fame. She’s probably never had to struggle for anything in her life.”

“I tell you, she was a slave!” Aseel banged a hand on the table, dark eyes narrowed. “She’s struggled!”

“It’s well documented that she was a slave,” I said. Both women stared at me. That’s when I realized my mistake. The evidence had only come to light a few years ago, in my present.

“What do you mean, well documented?” Aseel had a knife in her voice. “Documented by whom?”

“Well, I… I guess… scholars?”

“How do you know that?” Soph was wary. “What did you do after working with the anarchists?”

I thought about our conversation up to this point. Both women were clearly open to radical ideas, but they had a healthy skepticism, too. They were against violence and sectarian drama. So I decided to take the risk. “I’m going to level with you. I’m a traveler. In my present, scholars have discovered strong evidence that Lucy Parsons was African American. A former slave.”

“African… American?” Aseel tried out the unfamiliar term.

“People study women in your time?” Soph’s face lit up.

“Yeah. In fact… I’m on a mission for a group of people who research women’s history.” I really hoped that I wasn’t making a giant mistake. But if I wanted their help, they needed to know.

Soph sat up, smoothed her collar, and poured another round. “Okay. Tell us everything.”

I cleared my throat and felt a nervous tingle. “I’m a geoscientist, and I’m trying to make an edit in the timeline.” Aseel and Soph gaped at me. What I’d admitted was taboo, even among subversives. The Chronology Academy hadn’t been founded yet, but deliberately editing history could still get you banned from the Machines.

I continued. “I can’t tell you much, but I’ve witnessed men—travelers—trying to revert women’s rights to education. Trying to control our bodies, sometimes lethally. I’m trying to stop them.” I thought of Berenice again, and quelled a rush of terror. “I came here because they seem to be taking inspiration from Anthony Comstock. I don’t think he’s their leader, but he’s some kind of… historical beacon.”

They glanced at each other. Soph toyed with her glass but didn’t drink. “Comstock arrested my friend Penny in New York. He… he dragged her to the police station when she was in the middle of an abortion, along with her patient. They let the poor woman die, bleeding on the floor of the police station. Penny committed suicide rather than go to prison.”

I was shocked. “I heard him give a speech in New York where he bragged about how many abortionists he’d driven to suicide. But I thought he was saying it for effect.”

Soph shook her head and I realized she was on the brink of tears. “I’m so sorry,” I said gently. “That’s why I want to make this edit and stop the men who follow him.”

Aseel looked grim. “That’s a tall order. Comstock is a special agent for the post office. He can snoop on anyone’s mail and have them arrested if he thinks it’s obscene or indecent.”

I nodded. “He’s looking for newsletters exactly like the ones you write, Soph. He’s gotten some courts to agree that information about birth control is obscene.”

“I know.” Soph walked to the window, looking mournfully into the empty street. “I’ve worked very hard to stay out of his way.”

“How do you plan to make this edit?” Aseel demanded.

I desperately wanted to spill the whole plan, but I’d already broken too many rules. Revealing the future was against the law in most time periods. It was also a form of cruelty, a theft of people’s agency. Of course some travelers did it, but I wasn’t going to stoop that low. I needed a way to explain myself without causing harm.

“Comstock is making laws now that will last generations. But we can’t stop him directly. I’ve already tried that, with the anarchists. We have to taint his ideas somehow, make them seem repugnant to the general public.”

Aseel cleared her throat in the same way she did at the theater when she was running out of patience. “Very well, but as I asked before, how are you going to do that specifically?”

“Comstock is trying to branch out beyond New York and go national with his crusade. That much he’s already announced in various places. It’s a matter of public record. You can see why the theaters of the Midway are something he’d be very, very interested in.” That was as much as I could tell them, without veering into dangerous territory.

“He’s already shut down some theaters in New York, right?” Aseel asked.

“He has. And some bars. But the Midway could turn the tide back against him. If I can interfere with his work there, I think I can make the edit. But I can’t do it alone.”

Soph’s face had gone from somber to mischievous. “I’m in.”

“You are?” Aseel was dubious. “I mean, I like you, Tess. But I barely know you.”

“I understand that. We don’t have to do anything yet. All I ask is that you keep your eyes open and watch for any hints that Comstock or his YMCA boys might be coming.”

Aseel raised her glass. “Okay. I’ll drink to that.”

We all drank, but a mood of sobriety had overtaken us and it wasn’t long before we retired to bed.