I. Thesis
Johnny Sunshine Kowalski
We often joke that time travel is probably the gayest profession after male prostitution. The majority of time travelers are gay men. Specifically, small gay men. People forget that people, as a whole, got steadily bigger over the years, and so a typical person right now would be conspicuously large most anywhere else in time. And gay men all know how to hide in plain sight. Time travelers need to be invisible.
It’s 1804. Berks County, Pennsylvania.
I’m sitting on the stone wall of a farmer’s orchard at the back of his farm. I’ve been interviewing a farmer named Matthias Koch about his father’s experiences in the Revolutionary War. I don’t care about any of that. That’s not true. He claims his father personally convinced two Hessian mercenaries to desert and he then employed them on this farm for 10 years afterwards, which would be fascinating if we could confirm it.
I’m packing papers back into my leather satchel after he’s left me to return to the hand plow when I hear a distant voice call “He!”
I’ve always been amused by the German “he,” because it’s exactly the same word, sound and all, as the English word “hey,” but I’ve seen English speakers in various times beat their children for saying it. I’m half convinced that the reason it’s so reviled is precisely because the Germans use it.
I adjust my glasses. They’re where the real treasure trove of information is being recorded: images of an early 18th century farm at work, recordings of actual sounds and voices of the era, tiny micromeasurements of the air.
The orchard has bounced the sound, so I’m not sure who called or from where. The orchard stands behind me, dark and cool, smelling faintly of dung. In front of me is a wheat field in the process of being plowed and sown by a cluster of 20 men in wide hats and heavy vests. One of them is Black, which is something the history books like to omit. Life for a 19th century farm laborer is not what we would call a good life, but I’ve seen firsthand how Black slaves are treated. I wish I could get his story. I wish I could get all their stories into the history books. But I cannot pay him a day’s wages.
Down the hill is a spring with a schpringhaus sitting in it. A schpringhaus is a small, stone building that is used like a refrigerator, letting the ice-cold spring water cool it as it flows around its base.
Next to the schpringhaus, standing on a flat stone in the stream where he can’t be seen by the men in the field, I see a young man, maybe 15. He’s got a stringy beard and severe acne. He motions with his arm for me to come to him.
We call it gaydar. It’s how we instinctively spot a fellow gay man. In the days when we lived in the closet, it was an essential survival tool. It literally kept us from getting killed. It lingers as a way we keep our community together. And once you develop it, you never really lose it, especially when you time travel.
My gaydar buzzes.
I slip my pen into my vest pocket and move down the hill. The young man disappears into the schpringhaus once he verifies that I’m moving his direction.
The flat rocks that bridge the stream and lead to the half-height door of the schpringhaus are wet and slick, and my hard leather shoes have smooth soles that don’t provide much traction. I tiptoe across and up to the door.
The boy inside meets my eyes. OK, if being in love is like electricity, gaydar is like the background static you can feel in the air during an electrical storm. It’s not strong enough that you can feel a shock, but it’s there, buzzing, tingling. Gaydar isn’t attraction. In fact, the boy in front of me is physically repulsive, not just because of his age, but also his body odor. Yet I’m now certain that he’s one of us.
And I’m keenly aware that he’s in Pennsylvania Deitsch country in 1804.
And my heart breaks.
I was in grad school when the Supreme Court ruled that the New American Morality Act was Constitutional.
My first alert was a text message from my mom: “Johnny Sunshine, you do what you need to do to stay safe. I love you, always.”
It was in the middle of a seminar. Eight grad students and an overbearing professor, Doctor Jessica Saxon, in a hundred-year-old building that should have been torn down 80 years before. I blinked at the message, not understanding.
The news alert came through at the exact moment I heard the footsteps of the police officers coming down the hall to arrest me. I didn’t need more than the headline. My straight friends later told me of staring at the news story in shock and disbelief. There’s no disbelief when you’re the one who’s the target.
Doctor Saxon was a lesbian but had been married to a man for many years in her younger days. She looked at me, then out into the hallway. “Go!”
I sprang from my seat and shoved the old-fashioned awning window open. I squeezed through it. I had just seen a flash of the men in camouflage pushing Doctor Saxon aside when the bushes below were suddenly all around me.
I sprinted for the woods.
I found out later that Doctor Saxon served five years.
“Wer iss du? Wu iss du her?” The boy’s eyes are wide and he has backed against a shelf of jarred fruit as he interrogates me.
Direct questions—who am I and where am I from—and very much not the formal German I was taught. Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch is actually a distinct German dialect, but since I’m clearly not a local, I use German.
“Ich heiße John Smith,” I say. We don’t use our real names when we time travel. That would be conspicuous. Though, to be fair, Johnny Sunshine Kowalski is a conspicuous name in any time.
He switches to English, which he speaks flawlessly except for the lilting local accent that makes every sentence sound like a question, and every question sound like a statement. “Not your name. Who are you? Where are you from?”
It’s a sad truth that every once in a while we don’t pass. We don’t know why. Sometimes, someone, somehow knows. But we still must protest. “I come from Connecticut.”
He scoffs. “You are funny. I can’t tell if you are young or old. Your clothes are funny. Your glasses are funny. You walk funny. You smell funny. Are all men from Connecticut funny?”
“Only the educated ones.”
I step down from the door and onto the wet floor of the schpringhaus. His eyes grow slightly wider and he presses a millimeter more back into the shelves. He’s taller and broader than me, even as I pull myself up to my full height in the low building. I’m in no way a physical threat to him. Something else is scaring him.
He pants slightly before he asks in a hushed voice, “Iss du… are you… en Haasyaeger?”
My brain scrambles to translate that. Rabbit hunter. Am I a rabbit hunter? I’m clearly not a hunter of any sort. Yaage can also mean “chase,” so it could be rabbit chaser. I suppose that might be a term for a mythical creature like a time traveler. It could also be slang for a homosexual that hasn’t come down to us. The kid would have gaydar of his own, after all, but our modern understanding of sexuality and the vocabulary that comes with it is still a century in the future. All I can do is shake my head, perplexed.
He springs forward and grabs both of my hands. “I would like to go with you.”
I extract my hands from his and point towards the road. “I am next going to interview Herr Kelkar.”
“No!” He stomps one foot and flaps his hands like a preschooler. “I do not care who you are. I do not care where you come from. But wherever, take me with you when you go back!”
He is looking down at the floor, but I can still feel the pain in his eyes. And I understand.
Gay. 1804. Traditional Pennsylvania Deitsch family. This is a combination that could be lethal, very probably has been lethal in a great many cases that history doesn’t record. If his father is at all prone to violence behind closed doors, anything is better than this. Even the complete unknown.
“I’m just an historian,” I say. “I can’t kidnap you away from your family.”
He wipes his eyes. He’s crying. “You are no historian.”
Actually, I am.
I want to reach out to him. I want to hug him and tell him everything will be all right.
But it won’t be.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
I had been on the streets for two years when I was the target of a fag hunt. Fag hunts were a way that “real” men showed how “manly” they were by getting a group of other “manly” men together to chase down some innocent streetwalker. It always ended with a rape. But if you dragged the hunt out long enough, at least some of the gang gave up, and the rest were usually too tired to kill you afterwards.
My nest was in a cardboard box between two dumpsters in an alley. A nearby kitchen vent kept it pretty warm in the winter, and the sun never quite shone directly down in the alley, so it was a few degrees cooler in the summer. Plus it was dark, which was usually an advantage.
I knew I was in trouble when I happened to look behind the one dumpster and saw three men, side-by-side, backlit by the glaring lights of the boulevard. Their pear-shaped silhouettes and lousy posture meant they couldn’t be law enforcement, but the crowbar, 2x4, and tire iron they carried meant they weren’t friendly.
I clutched my knees to my chest, hyperventilating. I had to decide whether to make a break for it now and reveal that I was here or stay put and hope they’d somehow miss me when they started working their way up the alley.
I rolled to my knees and then hoisted myself to a starting position. I counted down to myself. 3-2-1 Go! I shot out from between the dumpsters, tearing my box in the process, bounced off the brick wall opposite, and sprinted up the alley toward the hills.
“Got one!”
“There he goes!”
“Coming your way!”
An enormous pair of arms came out of nowhere, catching me across the ribs. I almost went down, but they held firm and dragged me into a doorway.
Every law enforcement officer in the country was required to send me to a conversion therapy camp if they found me. I knew never to cry for help.
His name is George Washington Koch, but everyone calls him Wasch. It’s the sort of thing that drives historians and genealogists mad, trying to figure out if the person in this document is the same as the person in that document, especially since most English speakers would write it “Vosh” if they just asked him his name and not how to spell it.
He’s now sitting on the wet floor, sobbing.
We’re taught to always stay on the same level or lower than whoever we’re talking to. I sit down cross-legged and feel the cold water seep through my pants. “Here’s the thing, Wasch,” I say. “There are two possibilities. One: I am who I say I am, and if you come with me all you’ll end up doing is wander around with me while I take notes until some sheriff comes to take you home and me to prison. Two: I really do come from someplace weird and exotic, where you’ll never fit in and never be happy.”
His voice is choked. “Here I don’t fit in. Here I’m not happy.”
What can I tell him? Go back to Germany and wait a hundred fifteen years because the Weimar Republic was a great place to be a gay man? Stay here and wait two hundred ten years? In both cases, just be sure to get out before…
I shudder.
He looks up at me, tears streaking the muck on his face.
“Dieses Wasser ist kalt,” I try, dismissing my shudder as a chill.
He shakes his head and swallows before he speaks. “Why? Why can’t I just follow you? If you are who you say you are you can walk up to the sheriff and tell him to send me home.”
I scoff. There is no way I could find the sheriff and he knows it. Even if I walk all the way to Reading, odds are that he’s out of town. “Whose story would the sheriff believe, mine or your father’s?”
“Why can’t you take me?”
Even if I were to find the documentary proof that he is going to die here, today, that his family is going to come out to the schpringhaus and find him lifeless in the water, I can’t take him with me. Even walking through history and observing causes tiny timequakes that can be felt and measured back in my own time. Changing things in any way can rip spacetime apart. Wasch’s fate is to stay here, now, in 1804 and see where his life takes him.
He’s relatively masculine. He can pass. I’m sure his fate is to find a nice farmgirl and bring her a lifetime of misery in a loveless marriage. He may manage to force himself to produce a few children so he has some security in his old age. More likely, he’ll die young and childless and leave a destitute widow.
It’s no consolation that it’s already happened.
I got recruited to the time traveler corps as I was finishing grad school.
It was 15 years after I started and in Canada, not the United States. I wasn’t the top student they’d ever had. They weren’t a top program. But they managed to claw my transcripts out of my U.S. schools and they got me back on track.
I had defended my dissertation but hadn’t heard anything yet. I was sitting in the grad student lounge, talking to my fellow students, who were busy assuring me that my age and my sexual orientation wouldn’t influence my committee at all. I’d been around enough to consider them hopelessly naive.
I heard footsteps coming down the hall, marching purposefully.
I had instinctively turned and made for the window.
The grad student lounge was in a 21st century building. The windows didn’t open.
The door swung open and my advisor, Doctor Swanson, stood there with a tiny, olive-skinned man who set off my gaydar like a klaxon.
Doctor Swanson smiled, his gray beard riding up his chin as he did so. “Ah, there you are, Johnny Sunshine! Someone here who wants to meet you. Johnny Sunshine Kowalski, this is Doctor Titus Psaltiras, Deputy Director of Research for the Adamson Active Historical Research Center.”
Titus smiled and held out a hand, but my instincts still told me to slide out the window.
Wasch has stopped crying, but he still sits on the wet floor, knees clutched to his chest, glaring at me accusingly.
“Wasch, Ich habe keine magisch,” I say, looking into his eyes so he will believe me when I say that there’s nothing magical about me.
He laughs. “Do you know that every time you have spoken Deitsch to me, it has been to lie?”
He’s right. We’re actually taught that. It’s harder to detect a lie in someone who is speaking in a second language. “Fine, then I will speak English so you will believe me.”
He tips his chin back and sets his jaw.
And somehow I can’t tell him a lie. “There is a law. I cannot take anything. I cannot leave anything. I cannot change that. I must follow it. I had to sign a document.”
I have no idea why telling a Deitschman that you signed a document always ends the discussion, but it does. He grimaces, sniffles once, then stands up and opens the schpringhaus door. He looks back at me from the step, stopped low. “You are leaving me to die.”
I am. And I have no words. Finally, I just nod.
He ducks through the door and crosses the slippery rocks to the far side of the stream.
I watch him go, wishing I could do something, anything.
But I can’t save him.
I can’t save any of them.
I abandon the rest of my mission. I take out my timestream controller and disappear.
II. Antithesis
Folarin Ibrahim
I am staring down at my left hand. I’m holding a flare gun. I am ankle-deep in water, behind a stand of mangroves. I look up. A low, wide wooden sailing ship burns off the coast, fire spreading rapidly down the mast and onto the hull. White people on board scream. Some jump overboard. One is on fire himself.
I remember my name first: Folarin.
How had I forgotten my name?
How did I get here?
Where am I even?
The wooden ship looks 17th century. I shouldn’t have a flare gun. I check the hidden pocket in my dandogo. My timestream controller is there, along with six unspent flares and two empty flare casings.
Oh, dear Olodumare, what have I done?
The ship hisses and snaps as the fire spreads along the keel below the waterline. Two men still beat the flames futilely, but others have jumped overboard and are heading towards me.
I run.
Think, Folarin, think. What would explain this?
I head up a hill and into a densely wooded area. I stop, gasping for breath. I check my timestream controller.
It’s 1527. 16th century, then. Did I just attack a state-of-the-art slave ship?
That makes no sense. It goes against everything we’re taught, everything we’re trained to do.
But it would explain the amnesia.
I consider. If I traveled back to find where a slave ship coming in, then backtracked a day or two earlier up the coast and sank it, I would not have been able to observe it come in, because it never would have. That would cause a massive timequake. The old timeline would vanish. I would have no memory of it.
I laugh out loud.
Based on what they teach, I shouldn’t be alive. I shouldn’t exist. The whole universe shouldn’t exist. Spacetime should have been ripped apart.
I have changed history.
Time travelers trained in virtual classrooms, preparing us for the isolation of the job. We always lived in quarantine, alone. We could not risk taking a disease back into the past, nor bringing one back to our own time. The habitats were spacious and modern, and the classroom appeared around our desk every day, our fellow students floating as avatars all around us. And we learned one thing above all: “The future has hindsight.”
Time travelers worked exclusively in the past. A timestream controller would not permit moving forward in time beyond six seconds after the original time of departure.
But someone from the future could have, conceivably, come back to our time at any time.
My instructor was the Adamson Active Historical Research Center’s Director for Research himself, Aaron Goldstein. He, like most of us, was a small man. He had a large nose and tightly curled black hair. He wore it short and his face clean-shaven in the style of the times he mostly operated in. He introduced the conundrum in class with a simple question: “Do we trust the future?”
There were six of us training when I joined the corps. We exchanged glances, the avatar representations of ourselves betraying nothing.
I spoke first. “I don’t understand.”
“Imagine, someone from the future comes back to our time,” Aaron said, turning directly to my avatar. “You recognize him as a time traveler. That sometimes happens even to the best of us. We don’t know why. And, like everyone who recognizes a time traveler, you ask about the future. He says to you, ‘Folarin, I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you. You don’t want to know.’ How do you react?”
Hans, a blond, broad-shouldered man two desks over from me answered. “I expect I would be annoyed.”
“Exactly!” Aaron said. “How dare he say that he knows better than us? But we’re going to do exactly the same thing, whether we say it out loud or not, every second we’re in the past. Remember, time is an actual, physical dimension of spacetime. Natural human perception is to see the past as gone and the future as unwritten. But, really, everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen all exist simultaneously along this fourth dimension. That means that events in the past are never gone. We simply are no longer able to perceive them without moving our reference point along the fourth dimension. And when we do, we’re truly there. We will perceive the past as gone and the future as unwritten, just the same way everyone around us in that other time does. But we’re different. We know what happened, what will happen. And we need to know, really know, that those people need to go forward into their own future unaware, no matter what that future is.”
“Why?” I asked.
Aaron’s avatar shifted its head in a way that told me he must have been smirking. “Well, imagine again our future time traveler who comes back to our time. You ask about the future, and he says instead, ‘Folarin, tomorrow a construction crane is going to drop 30 tons of steel on your habitat, crushing the living room and bathroom. You’re going to spend six hours under it, bleeding out painfully.’ What would you do?”
“Stay in the kitchen all day,” Hans said.
“Exactly!” Aaron said. “And he will have caused a timequake. Spacetime could rip apart. And not just for the future. Remember, time is a physical dimension. That kind of rip would destroy the past and the present, too. Everyone who has ever lived, everyone who ever will live, written out of existence out of compassion for one person. The future has hindsight. He knows what will happen, and he knows that the universe will survive it. It’s a burden all time travelers carry in their hearts.”
“Yes, we know,” Tabitha, the only woman in our class, the only woman in the entire institute, said. “We take nothing, we leave nothing, we change nothing.”
“But it’s more than that,” Aaron said. “We need to truly internalize that what will happen has already happened. The choices you are making right now, to someone in the future, they’re done. You make decisions based on free will, but to someone else, someone in the future, you’ve already done it and they know what you decided. They know whether it was a good or a bad idea. They have hindsight.”
“So what you’re really saying,” I said, “is that to do this job, we’d have to be willing to stay in the living room.”
Aaron’s avatar nodded. “When you go back, you will see people just like you, making real decisions in real time. They could change what they do with just a word from you. But we can’t give them that word.” He paused for effect. “Anyone with any empathy at all is going to be slowly killed inside. Eventually, we all will face our own end knowing both that it has already happened and that someone, somewhere in time knew exactly what was in store for us. If anyone wants to leave the program, now is the time to do it.”
The silence that followed felt like it lasted for an hour. Hans’ avatar vanished.
Homosexuality was punishable by death in Nigeria up until the year before I was born. Even though it was not technically illegal anymore when I was growing up, it was still something I was never supposed to discuss, never supposed to consider.
I had never expected to feel my heart break when Hans left.
Aaron Goldstein stands in front of me. We’re outdoors. My first thought is that something must be very, very wrong if Aaron is violating quarantine by being in the same place at the same time as another time traveler.
We’re on a hill. The ocean is to my left. My left arm is outstretched, clutching my flare gun. A Portuguese galleon and two smaller merchant ships are in the process of being engulfed in flames.
Aaron’s mouth is open. He seems like he can’t breathe. He stares past me, his eyes filling with tears.
I can hear sailors screaming over the sound of the wind and the waves.
Aaron finally manages to speak. It comes out in a plaintive scream. “Folarin! What the hell did you just do?”
I search for the memories, but they are not there. “I honestly have no idea,” I say. “Did I just change history again?”
“Again?” Aaron roars. “Not five minutes ago you told me that you would never do such a thing!”
“To be fair,” I say, “that doesn’t sound like me. How exactly did that conversation go?”
“I was telling you that we’d detected a major timequake and you’re the only researcher out. Then you pulled out the flare gun and I told you you can’t do that or you’ll rip apart spacetime. And you said, ‘Trust me, Aaron, I would never do such a thing.’”
“Ah,” I say. “And I was right. Look around. Spacetime is still here, no?”
“Folarin!”
I put the flare gun back in the hidden pocket, noticing that I’ve got six spent casings clutched in my right hand. I put them away, too. “Usually when I get back to my own time and glance at my history texts I realize I know everything in them. Then the memories from my new timeline come back.”
“How many times have you done this?”
I stare at him for a moment. “I might be able to answer that.” I search my mind. It’s hazy, but memories are there. “Six?”
Aaron pinches the bridge of his nose and clenches his eyes shut. “Folarin! Every sailor on those ships has descendants. You’ve just erased God knows how many people from history!”
“And replaced them with the family tree of whoever it was they were about to steal from Africa.”
“Folarin, those slaves had children on other continents. You’ve erased them, too.”
“And replaced them with children here. Children who will grow up African. Children who might grow up free, even. The slaves who were meant to be on those ships will not die on the crossing. They will not be sold in a foreign slave market. The hypocrisy of history. African slaves are treated no worse in Africa than any other culture treats its own slaves, but African slaves overseas are treated worse than animals. These slavers will never take those slaves away, then justify the mistreatment because they bought them from Africans. How can we say that’s not better?”
“The United States may never exist—”
“Then it does not deserve to!”
Aaron opens his eyes and seems to choke again. And he finally looks to the sky and speaks so quietly I have to strain to hear him over the screams and fire and ocean behind me. “Folarin, the slave trade disrupted families all over Africa. You’re not just erasing family trees in Europe and America and Asia. You could erase your own.”
I fold my arms and stand tall. “How many times have I said this? If my existence is built on injustice, I do not deserve existence. If one of these times I erase myself instead of my memories… well… I find it hard to believe that it is painful to never have existed.”
“This goes against everything I taught you—”
“No!” I step closer so we are nearly nose-to-nose. “This is exactly what you taught me. The future has hindsight. I know the evils that these men are creating here, now. This is not some unwritten future. This is damage that will echo throughout time. And I see it. And I can fix it. You taught us that if the future says that we must die tomorrow, we face that, knowing that we must die tomorrow. Well, Aaron, I tell you that you can right the greatest wrongs in history. The price is that you won’t ever have existed. Do you do it? The future has hindsight. I’m doing it.”
“You can’t—”
“I can! I just did!”
“We operate on grant money. No one will ever—”
“Grant money!” I roar. “The governments, the foundations that write our checks won’t like it? They won’t like that instead of sitting around saying, ‘Oh, it’s too bad that that happened way back when,’ we fix it? So be it! Go after the big ones before they figure it out!”
“Folarin—”
“No, Aaron, listen to me!” I take a breath and deliberately lower my voice to a gentle tone. “Think about it. How many times have you wondered what would happen if you could change the course of, say, the Holocaust? We can. You can pop back in time to Austria in 1890, find Adolf Hitler when he’s an innocent little baby, and then pick up a rock and smash in his brains!”
Aaron stares at me.
I hold out my hands.
“I would never exist,” Aaron says.
“Then your existence is built on injustice,” I say. “But I won’t do it for you. I can’t right every wrong. I’m fixing these.”
Aaron reaches into the pocket of his trousers where he keeps his timestream controller.
He vanishes.
I can actually feel the timequake. It moves through me like my bones are resonating.
The galleon capsizes.
And I stand.
I feel certain I was just talking to someone. I wonder who it was.
My instructor was the Adamson Active Historical Research Center’s Director for Research himself, Titus Psaltiras. He, like most of us, was a small man. He was broad, though, and like most Greek men, he had an abundance of black hair. He introduced the conundrum in class with a simple question: “Does the future have power over us?”
There were six of us training when I joined the corps. We exchanged glances, the avatar representations of ourselves betraying nothing.
I spoke first. “I don’t understand.”
“Well,” Titus said, “we’ve drilled into you that the future has hindsight, right? We have hindsight about, say the Century of Terror in Europe. We know that trying to appease the Nazi party in 1933 by making Ernst Röhm chancellor was a terrible decision, and led to the complete extermination of every Jew in Europe, Germany conquering all of Europe and a good chunk of Africa and Asia, and is at the root of most of the international tensions that linger today. Let’s suppose that you were back in in Germany in 1933 and President Hindenburg or Franz von Papen suddenly turned to you and asked, ‘What do you think? Should we make this Röhm guy chancellor?’ What would you say?”
Hans, a blond, broad-shouldered man two desks over from me answered. “Oh, hell no!”
“But you can’t, right?” Titus said. “That would change history. That would create a timequake the likes of which the universe has never endured.”
“How do we know?” I asked. “Röhm wasn’t the only Nazi. He was charismatic and was the leader of the biggest group of brownshirts. They were on their way to power with or without that one terrible decision. Maybe there will be no timequake at all, just a small hiccup.”
“Aha!” Titus’ avatar clapped its hands together. “So, on the one hand we have Hans, saying the future has power, and we could change the course of history by turning this one event. On the other hand, we have Folarin saying that the path of history is inexorable, and no one person can significantly alter the forces. Prevent Röhm from becoming chancellor in 1933, maybe the Nazis win the next election and he takes it outright. Maybe he becomes Führer anyway in a coup. Assassinate Röhm, even, and maybe someone else is there waiting to take his place. What do we think?”
Tabitha, the only woman in our class, the only woman in the entire institute, spoke. “It doesn’t matter. We can only know what did happen. Never what would have happened if something changed.”
“Exactly,” Titus said. “The future has hindsight, but hindsight is only one perspective. If we start messing around in history, timequakes notwithstanding, we have no way of knowing we’re not just making things worse, right? Take Röhm. As horrible as he was, what if one of the other Nazis had risen to power in his place, someone who wasn’t gay, someone who bought in to the popular homophobia of the time? Now it’s not only the Jews who get exterminated, it’s the gays as well. Make it someone like Göring or Günther as Führer and you’ve got a madman who believes in eugenics actually in charge, and it could have been three-quarters of the population of Europe that died. We just don’t know.”
“So how does that give us power?” I asked. “We can’t use the knowledge we have.”
“Right!” Titus barked. “Is it still power if you can’t use it?”
“Yes,” Tabitha said matter-of-factly.
Titus’ avatar turned to hers. “Why?”
“Potential energy,” she said, “is still energy. We have the capacity to do something, we choose whether we do so or don’t. That’s power. When I go into the past, I’m going to be choosing to perpetuate the patriarchy, keeping my head down, trying not to get raped, moving in women’s circles without ever once suggesting to them that they deserve better. That’s power.”
“Exactly.” Titus’s avatar shifted back to its lecture position. “Think of it this way: We’re the past for someone else. Let’s say a time traveler showed up here. We recognized him. That does sometimes happen, by the way, no matter how careful you are. We did what everyone who recognizes a time traveler does, we asked him to help us. Doesn’t matter what we asked him for. Tomorrow’s lottery numbers. He absolutely has the power to grant our request, right? The fact that there are consequences that he’s not willing to suffer does not mean that he’s powerless.”
“So you’re saying,” I said, “that when we go into history, we’re going to be like unfeeling gods who refuse to hear the pleas of the mere mortals.”
Titus sighed. “Yes, actually, that’s exactly what I’m saying. And it’s the hardest part of this job. Every person you meet in the past is someone you could help, someone you could save, someone you could elevate to more than they ever will be. And you won’t. Every trip brings you home with an ever-worsening case of survivor’s guilt. If there’s anyone here who thinks they can’t deal with that, they should leave the program now.”
I almost disconnected from the classroom.
I glanced over and saw Hans’ avatar, sitting expressionless, and I decided I couldn’t go.
There is no way I can take out every slave vessel. I’m only one man. Plus, I had to hack around an attempt to disable my timestream controller the last time I was back in my own time. I can’t keep going back and forth.
Slipping in time without returning home is tricky, but possible. I program the timestream controller for Luanda, 1622. Too late for thousands and thousands of captives, but a turning point where Africa just missed a chance to turn the tide.
My first two attempts to slip immediately report failure, and I feel my bones vibrate ever so slightly. Timequakes. Slipping anywhere but back home can take up to 90 seconds. They say that the easier slips take longer. I realize why. The timestream controller simply prevents failed attempts by trying again slightly earlier. The third attempt moves me in about 30 seconds.
Luanda is a Portuguese city cut from the rainforest on the west coast. I appear just outside the stone wall of the fortress, dropping a few inches onto a rutted dirt road. The city is already well established. Too well established. Roads curve around the harbor where ships load human cargo. Stone buildings look like they have been here long enough to take root. I want to burn it all down.
This is not a part of the continent I’d usually operate on. I’m of Yoruba descent. They’re mostly Mbundu here. White people, including my superiors, assume Black people all look alike to Black people, too, but we don’t. I’ll be conspicuous. My Portuguese is limited, and my Kimbundu is just a few phrases. But I must risk it.
I steel my courage and walk around the fortress until I find an arched gate. I use broken Portuguese to tell the guard there that I am here to see Nzinga.
The Portuguese wouldn’t know a Yoruba from a Mbundu. The guard points me toward the house of the local judge. The Africans in the city do know a Yoruba from a Mbundo, especially one in Yoruba clothing and not Portuguese. They stare at me as I pass. There is a real risk I could be nabbed and put on a slave ship myself. I lack the pomp and escort of an ambassador, and foreigners are otherwise all slaves. The Ndongo legal system is famous for working hard to ensure that any slave being sold is in slavery legally, but it’s easy to imagine that a lone Yoruba would be allowed to slip through the cracks. And it’s even easier to imagine the Portuguese not caring at all.
The judge’s house is a rectangular stone-and-wood building. A slave answers the door and I tell her in Portuguese that I have a message for Nzinga.
The white woman of the house eyes me curiously as we pass through into the kitchen, where a Jesuit priest sits at a table with a woman who can only be Nzinga herself. She is undoubtedly royalty. She is about 40, with feathers in her hair and jewels mounted to the iron and copper rings on her arms and legs. She wears a traditional spotted skirt and an opulent green wrap draped over her shoulder. She arches an eyebrow at me as the slave announces me.
I try a long shot. “Do you speak English?”
She starts. The Jesuit gives her quizzical look. “That is known only to my tutor,” she says slowly.
History records only that she spoke Portuguese, but it makes sense that she would have also studied the languages of Portugal’s main rivals.
“I am here to help you,” I say in slow, clear words, noting that the Jesuit does not appear to be understanding us. “I know the future. You are here to negotiate a treaty with the Portuguese. You will succeed, but they will not follow the treaty. In two years, your brother will die and you will be king of Ndongo. If that comes to pass, will you meet me again?”
She leans forward, sparing a glance for the Jesuit. “Yes.”
“I will re-appear two years from today. Name the place.”
Her eyebrow arches imperiously. “If, in two years’ time, I am King of Ndongo, I shall be at the house of my father in Kabasa.”
Her brother will lose control of Kabasa to the Portuguese in just a few months, but Nzinga will reclaim it shortly after rising to power. There is a good chance she will be there.
I nod and exit the way I came. The spot outside the fortress wall is isolated enough that I take out my timestream controller.
Kabasa will be a difficult slide. It is a large city, at least ten times the size of Luanda, located in difficult terrain that has never been surveyed by a time traveler. It takes ten attempts, my bones vibrating the whole time, before the timestream controller sets me down on a large patio, behind an enormous stone column.
I’m in the palace itself.
1624.
The column I’m behind is made of two kinds of stone. The lower portion is carved with images of animals and looks like it has been through a fire. The upper portion is a local sandstone and is finished smooth. This castle has already been destroyed and rebuilt at least once, and I know that Nzinga has only just reclaimed it from the Portuguese.
The patio has a commanding view. Kabasa is a city in ruins, sprawling out across several hills. But the markets below are open. Homes are being rebuilt. There is hope in the air.
I step out from behind the column.
Nzinga is here, dressed as warrior, bare-chested. Four male warriors flank her. They dance, swinging battle axes.
One of the men sees me. He starts. He raises his axe and moves towards me. Nzinga holds out a hand and stops him. “Thou art punctual, my prophet.” Her English is better now. “I had expected thee to enter through the gates.”
“Anyone who knows the Portuguese,” I say, stepping forward, “could have predicted that they would betray you. A clever man would predict to you and your uncles that each would be the next king. Only I can appear deep inside your castle.”
“I would know thy secret.”
“I have many, but I must explain.”
She gives a command in Kimbundu. One of the warriors dashes off. Seconds later, slaves arrive with a large chair for her and a small stool for me. We sit.
“What shall I call thee?” Nzinga asks.
“I am Folarin,” I say.
“What thou hast foretold has come to pass, Folarin,” she says. “I would hear you explain.”
“I am a traveler,” I begin. “I have seen the future. I can tell it to you. But when I do, it will change. And I do not believe I will remember it again when that happens. It may change enough that I will cease to exist. I will vanish, and you will not remember me. But I think you might remember the things I told you.”
She raises her chin and looks down her nose at me. “Thou art a strange, little man.”
“Yes,” I agree. Portuguese history isn’t trustworthy, but most sources agree it is not wise to disagree with Nzinga. “The history I remember, this is a turning point. You are a brilliant leader. You are a great warrior. But the Portuguese will win the war.”
“Art thou here to taunt me?” She asks.
“No,” I say. My bones vibrate. “I would like to teach you how to make a rifle.”
Hans lived in Residential Habitat 10, just across the courtyard from mine. He slept during the day. I waited until midnight. I opened the double pressure seal on my habitat and ran across the courtyard. I felt like a criminal.
I dove into the little alcove porch of Habitat 10. I laid my hand on the visitor’s panel. A moment later, the screen lit up and I saw Hans’ face, Hans’ real face. He was a little older than his avatar, but every bit as handsome. “Folarin? What are you doing breaking quarantine?” he said.
“Can I come in?” I asked.
“Then we’ll both be grounded for a month,” he said. “What do you need?”
“I wanted to talk. Just talk. Wanted to see you. Wanted to see you in person.”
He was quiet for a long time. Too long. “Listen, Folarin, I don’t think this is a good idea.”
I hit the door with my hand. “Just let me in, Hans. Just let me in.”
“Folarin,” he said, “just go back to your habitat and get some sleep. We can chat on the messaging system.”
“I don’t need sleep!” I yelled. “I need to spend some time with a human!”
Hans sighed. “I don’t think I can give you what you need, Folarin.”
“You don’t know what I need!”
I became aware of a presence behind me. I turned around. Two campus police officers stood there.
I switched off the visitor’s panel and stepped off the porch.
The older of the two police officers motioned back to my habitat. I started walking. They flanked me. “Listen,” the younger one said, “I know things are different where you’re from, but you need to behave more civilized around these parts, eh?”
1627. My bones ache all the time now. The Kwando River has dead Portuguese and Mbundo soldiers floating in it. The water flows red with their blood. Is this how the Battle of the Kindonga Islands went? I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything.
But I know that if I return home, they will never let me come back again. Will my memory come back if I don’t look at the history textbooks?
I stagger down the hill, coughing. The air still reeks of gunpowder. I’m standing ankle-deep in the river before I realize I’m down.
Did Nzinga win here? Nzinga had just won here. Is that what happened?
If we’ve changed history, it’s not enough. I still exist. If we turned the tide and ended the export of African slaves, I shouldn’t exist. It’s not conceivable that my family tree would have stayed the same over four hundred years.
A muddy feather sticks out of the water. Through the murk I can see that it’s attached to a body. An important-looking body. I slosh over to it and grab it by the back of the doublet. I hoist.
It’s Captain Bento Banha Cardoso himself.
Of course. I remember. Nzinga defeated his and Sebastião Dias’ combined forces here. Of course. Every schoolchild knows that. Nzinga’s soldiers armed with arquebuses and flintlocks modified with nzinga barrels shot with such accuracy and ferocity that the Portuguese were taken completely by surprise, their conscripted local troops deserting by the thousand. I laugh, suddenly remembering a white colleague saying to me, Well, actually, in Kimbundu ‘nzinga’ means ‘twisted’ so there’s no evidence that it’s really connected to Queen Nzinga, and some of DaVinci’s drawings indicate that Europeans understood the importance of spinning the projectile much earlier.
Nzinga barrels. My bones still vibrate. Is that a change? I don’t remember.
But we won. Nzinga won. She stopped the Portuguese advance and turned the tide back. She will soon drive the Portuguese out of Ndongo and Matamba, the only free African states.
The only free African states.
It’s not enough. It’s still not enough.
I scramble back up the hill. It’s rough going. Nzinga has built trenches and caves to ambush the coming armies. When I get to the top, I spot the canoe bringing Nzinga over from Danji Island, where her court-in-exile is housed. Even from this far away I can see she is pleased. I scramble toward the opposite shore to meet her as her canoe comes in.
“You have done well, my prophet,” she says as her slaves lift her out of her canoe and place her on dry land.
“My king,” I say bowing, “I remember the new future now. You will, indeed, drive out the Portuguese from this region, but the other nations will still believe that the Portuguese will deal honestly with them even as they betray you. Some of them will make alliances with Portugal’s European rivals. The Europeans think Africans are inferior creatures, no better than animals. They will still carve up Africa and destroy her people.”
“My obligation is to Ngondo and Matamba,” she says. “If other kings wish to be European slaves, that is their right.”
“Yes,” I say, not knowing what I’m saying, “but you have the power to be much more than king of Ngando and Matamba. You could be Empress of Africa.”
She turns slightly and glares at me. “You remember this, do you?” Her English improves daily. She even has the tone of voice right to cut me down instantly. She is a fearsome woman. Beautiful and fearsome.
“No,” I admit. “But I remember that historians have debated for centuries what would have happened if you had realized your greatest asset.”
She arches her eyebrow at me. “And that is?”
“The slaves you have freed.”
She laughs at me. “I free my enemies’ slaves because they are not slaves. The Portuguese have no right to most of them.”
“But they fight for you,” I insist.
“They fight for me because I freed them,” she says.
“Exactly!” I say.
I feel my bones beginning to vibrate again.
“My king, I may not have time. I have explained before that I will cease to exist if I change the future too much. Let me explain quickly.” I scramble for a stick and start drawing in the mud. I have no idea what I am drawing. “The kings who are willing to be European vassals are willing to be vassals, no?”
She nods. “I expect that is true, yes.”
“So,” I say, “kingdom by kingdom, land by land, until you have covered all of Africa, you can make them your vassals.”
“Most are strong enough to resist,” she says.
“And that’s where you don’t realize your power. Every nation you move into, the slaves want to be free. If they all know that you free the slaves wherever you go, they will rise up before you get there. The other kings will not be strong enough to resist. They will have to choose between being your vassal or having a slave revolt to put down. You tell them all, that their choice is to join you in driving out the Europeans or to lose all they have.”
She looks distant for a moment. She smirks. “It is a tempting plan, but a nation the size of Ndongo is difficult enough to manage. It would take many months to cross all of Africa.”
“Your engineers have a steam engine,” I say. My bones vibrate more. Is that a change? Did I somehow change that, too? The pain is intense. I am gasping for air. I drop to my knees. “Build iron rails. Make the steam engine turn wheels that move on those rails. You can cross all of Africa in a few days. And without slaves.”
“Your plan is audacious, my prophet,” she says.
I collapse to the ground, screaming.
She speaks to her entourage in Kimbundu. I hear the borrowed words steam engine and rails.
I can’t see. Pain is all that exists.
“My prophet,” I hear her say, “I will try to remember you.”
III. Synthesis
Titus Psaltiras
I know it must be a big one before I’m out of my chair. Every alert in my quarters goes off at once. I’ve got automated reports, text messages, and people trying to connect via videocon all coming in simultaneously.
Timequakes have a nexus at the point in history where the change was made and a second one at the point the time traveler departed from. My desk has lit up with readouts of this one before I’m even there. I push aside the dishes from my breakfast and I can see that the waves on this timequake are jumbled, like it has dozens of nexuses back in time, all over the planet. The waves are canceling and amplifying each other. But it’s clear that there is a terminal nexus here, thirty seconds ago, in Residential Habitat 9 of the institute.
The problem is that Residential Habitat 9 is empty.
The wall of my office lights up with a videocon I haven’t accepted. I see the white-haired head of my dean, Babette Rossi. “Titus, what the hell just happened?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, Babette,” I say. “I don’t have any researchers out right now.”
“What?”
“You heard me. All 57 researchers are in their quarters, and so am I. The readout I’ve got says it’s whoever is in Habitat 9, but Habitat 9’s been empty for 8 years now.”
“I want to talk to everyone.”
“Sure.” I mute my video and send an “emergency all hands” notice to all my researchers. Some of them will be asleep—people like to stay on the same time zone as their families—but the emergency tag should set off an alarm for them.
One by one, faces appear on my wall in a grid. Within a few minutes, everyone is accounted for. “For those who haven’t met her, this is Babette Rossi, Dean of History, Gates University, Edmonton. We’ve had a major timequake, and she wanted to make sure everyone is accounted for.”
“That’s everyone?” Babette asks.
“Until you up my budget,” I say.
Babette looks directly into her camera. “Now, I can’t emphasize strongly enough how seriously we take timequakes. Every incident, even minor ones, brings a surge of negative publicity and another push to shut you down.”
“Babette,” I say, “we didn’t do it. I’m sending you the logs. Nobody here was out. Nobody here has been out in two days. Our last mission was Johnny Sunshine in 1804, which is a couple centuries after it looks like this one began.”
Johnny Sunshine Kowalksi still has his 19th century facial hair. He strokes his beard and wiggles his fingers at his camera. He’s grinning, despite the concerned look in his eyes.
“I want a security sweep of Habitat 9,” Babette says.
“I’ll let you know if we find anything, but I’m telling you, it’s empty. Your own logs should show that.”
Babette glances to the side. “I’ve got the president of the university calling. I’ll be back when I’m done with her.” Her face vanishes from the grid.
I drop the act and look directly into my camera. “All right, fooling aside, a timequake starting in a building that’s been vacant for 8 years can only mean one thing: Someone who has worked here for 8 years just deleted themselves from history.”
It was when I was a much younger man. It was simultaneously one of the simplest and one of the most complex missions we had ever done. We knew almost nothing about the ancient Cycladic civilization, an island culture in the Mediterranean. With many unknowns, it was impossible to put me down on land for the initial survey. So we built a boat in my living room and dropped me in the Aegean Sea.
All I had to do was sail close enough to an island to get some recordings. If the natives seemed friendly to foreigners, some samples of their language would have been invaluable, since the linguists were still struggling to untangle it.
We started me as far from the islands as we dared and in the middle of the night, lest some sailor end up with a story about the fishing boat that appeared in the sky and dropped three feet into the water.
My first warning should have been the plume of smoke over the horizon as the sun came up. But I was young, inexperienced, and simply recorded some images to ask about later.
I learned that day that ancient tsunamis weren’t well recorded.
I’d been on the water for twelve hours, learning quickly that the Cycladic fisherman were a gregarious and helpful bunch. When they saw my boat, they called out and waved me over to the schools they were working. I had no nets, of course. We take nothing, we leave nothing. But I was glad to get close enough to help them haul theirs, recording them the whole time.
That plume of smoke turned out to be a volcano that was mid-eruption, a good hundred years before my history books said it first erupted.
I looked up to see the nearest island receding quickly into the distance, its shoreline expanding right before my eyes.
I instinctively cried out and pointed.
The fishermen looked. All at once they turned their sails and grabbed oars, desperately trying to reach shore.
I needed to get out. But I couldn’t disappear in the presence of people. I yanked my tiller to point into the wave.
The wave’s leading edge picked up my boat so fast I felt my heart drop into my stomach. The bow tipped up and threw me back. I grabbed the gunwale. I clutched for dear life. Seawater cascaded over the sides of my little boat.
I tipped forward again. I caught a glimpse of the rest of the fleet behind me, a hundred meters below me. The wave had actually begun to break. It rolled over those other boats, snapping their plank hulls into splinters.
And then I dropped. Weightless. I plunged, legs in the air, still clinging. The boat hit the water and I hit the gunwale. The snap that I felt in my ribs I also heard in the hull. My boat folded in two. And then, I was accelerating again, this time toward the island.
I coughed. Blood. I rolled over the gunwale and into the flooding, broken boat. I seemed to be moving faster and faster. My head spun.
Then I saw a hand. Then another. Then a face. One of the fishermen I had been with was pulling himself onto my boat, coughing, gasping.
We take nothing. We leave nothing. And I was about to die and leave not only myself but my boat here.
I pulled out my timestream controller.
The fisherman saw what I was holding. He looked up and locked eyes with me. We didn’t share a common language, but I knew what he was asking.
I programmed the timestream controller to exclude him, and I activated it.
I decelerated instantly. The boat smashed to splinters and I plowed into my living room floor and rolled like I’d been thrown from a plane crash. I laid, broken, on the carpet.
And, somewhere in the Aegean, one more fisherman drowned.
“Now think, everyone,” I say. “Someone was here. One of our colleagues. None of us will have any memories of them. But something is off about the institute. And not just a habitat building that has been sitting empty for no good reason for 8 years. We have 6 of those, after all. What has always struck you as off or nonsensical about this place?”
“The lack of women,” Tabitha mutters under her breath.
“That’s safety,” I say.
“But why?” Tabitha demands in her full voice. She leans in. “Why do we just accept that the past is so unsafe for women that we can’t risk sending women back in time? That’s off. That’s wrong.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Johnny Sunshine interrupts, “but if someone erased themselves from history, shouldn’t none of us be here?”
I suppress the cringe. “The absolute destruction of spacetime has always been a theory—a solid theory—but not proven. The problem is, whoever just erased themselves from history now doesn’t exist, has never existed, so how can they go back to do whatever it is they did? So history should correct itself. But it can’t. Consensus opinion is that a major paradox like that should be destructive.”
There’s a silence.
“But?” Johnny Sunshine asks.
“But, we’ve actually created a number of minor paradoxes deliberately,” I admit. “Any time one of you doesn’t come back after six seconds, I get an alert. I jump back in time two minutes and send you instructions to abort your mission.”
“I get last-minute instructions to abort all the time,” Tabitha says.
“Yes, Tabitha, you’ve been killed 18 times.”
“What?” she barks.
“Yes, Tabitha, you’re our prime offender.”
“Wait, how do I get myself killed?” she asks.
“We don’t know,” I say. “No one remembers. I jump back six seconds after I left with no memory of why I jumped, but I see that I cancelled a mission and I figure out what must have happened.”
Wait!” Tabitha says. “Is that why the timestream controllers lock out when we get those no-go orders?”
“Actually, we only lock them out if you leave anyway and we have to go back a second time,” I say. “And do I need to point out that you shouldn’t know that they get locked out?”
“I was dead?”
“Yes,” I say. “18 times.”
There’s another silence. This one lingers.
“So, you’re saying it’s actually possible,” Hans says. “One of us might have gone back and changed history so severely that they were never born, but the universe is still here, still just fine.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Or, maybe it’s going to unravel slowly. This is completely unprecedented. That’s why we need to figure out what’s going on. So, everyone look around. What’s missing?”
“Africa?” Tabitha suggests.
I’m about to object, and I catch myself. “Talk me through that.”
“Think about it,” she says. “We’ve got researchers here who specialize in the Americas. Europe. Asia. We’ve even got the two Aussies.”
“New Zealand,” Nikau protests.
“Why not Africa?” Tabitha continues. “I mean, I know ethnocentricity is a thing, but are we really supposed to believe that nobody considers African history important enough to research it? It’s especially ripe, because so many of the African nations were late developing written language, so there’s a lot of undocumented history that’s relatively recent. Six empty habitats is about right to cover a continent, isn’t it?”
Dear, God, she’s right.
“So, you’re thinking,” Johnny Sunshine says, “that someone rewrote history to the extent that everyone from Africa vanished?”
Tabitha shrugs. “How hard is that? Take out Nzinga the Great before the Battle of the Kindonga Islands and Africa fails to unite against the Europeans, right? Completely different history.”
“That is… a distinct possibility,” I say.
There is another long silence.
“You’ve really saved Tabitha eighteen times?” Johnny Sunshine asks.
I laid in the remnants of my boat, dripping wet, sobbing. My airlock hissed and opened with a clunk. The director of the institute at the time was Eira O’Connell. She broke quarantine and came into my quarters, sandy hair in a hurried ponytail and dressed in her workout gear. She swept over to me and placed a freckled hand on my wrist, then my neck. “As much as I want the data, I can make it go away, if you’d like.”
I didn’t know what she meant. “Nothing will,” I rasped.
She knelt down beside the broken hull of my boat and lowered her head so she could look up into my eyes. “Paramedics are on their way, but are you going to be able to live with it?”
I grabbed her arms and clung for dear life.
It wasn’t until I was promoted to director that I really understood what she had been offering.
“All this time!” Johnny Sunshine shouts. “All this time we could have been doing those little things we’ve all wanted to do to help people!”
“It’s not like that, J.S.,” I say. “Remember your training. We have power, but except for the hindsight of what happened, we don’t know any better than the people back in the past. In fact, we know less. They know their world. They know the people. They know the culture. If we had those insights, we wouldn’t need to be back then doing the research we’re doing. It’s supreme arrogance for us to go back and play God.”
“It’s supreme arrogance,” Johnny Sunshine screams, “to decide that our own status quo is more important than helping someone who’s begging for help!”
“We’re not talking about playing God,” Tabitha says. “I’d lay 10 to 1 odds that that’s what whoever just erased themselves was doing. Took out a whole continent. No, I’m talking about not letting MaryBeth Jackson get raped.”
“Do you know how many times,” Johnny Sunshine fumes, “I’ve stood on the edge of a cotton plantation and watched as the Native American slaves got beaten, even killed? Every single time I could have said something? Done something? At least discussed the morality of keeping a fellow human being as… as… property? Tens of millions of Native American slaves! How was saving the one who was pleading for help going to hurt if spacetime really can handle a timequake?”
“J.S., think,” I say. “You free one slave. That slave moves north. He takes a seat on the train that your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather would have taken, and so he never meets your great-great-great-whatever grandmother. We can’t predict the ripples the changes can cause.”
“But…” Johnny Sunshine looks briefly flustered. “Someone used to say this. Who was it? That if my life is built on injustice that I don’t deserve it. Who said that?”
“I’ve heard that, too,” Tabitha says.
“Yeah,” Hans says. “Can’t remember where.”
“All right, everyone,” I say, “let’s just calm down.”
Johnny Sunshine grimaces and reaches for something off camera. He vanishes.
My timequake alarms go off again.
Johnny Sunshine reappears. He looks calm, serene even. And he has a pimply teenaged boy with him.
“Titus,” Johnny Sunshine says, “this is Wasch Koch. I’ve explained carefully what his request means, but he still asked me to take him with me when I went back to wherever I came from. I’m not playing God. I’m not acting from a position of power. I’m sharing the power I don’t deserve with someone who deserves the power I have. I’m trusting him to know what he wants and needs. You can fire me now.”
“Oh,” someone says.
All 57 of us stare blankly.
“Of course,” Tabitha says. “No matter the personal cost. Not gods. Not imperialists. People who have the tool to help. The power is in refusing to use it.”
“Tabitha, wait,” I say.
Tabitha disappears.
My timequake alarms go off again.
She reappears covered in blood.
Hans is the next to vanish. Then Asako. Even before the timequake alarms finish ringing, they’re ringing again.
And one-by-one, every single one of my researchers goes out unauthorized.
It’s the end. There will never be funding again after this.
Which means there’s only one thing to do.
I scramble for my timestream controller. They’ll be shutting it down soon. I don’t have much time. I still have the logs that will tell me exactly when and where a Cycladic fisherman will hit the water.
I don’t have my boat, but by God, I’m going to try to swim.
First published in Departure Level Quarterly (2020).
Original publication © 2020; this version © 2026 Kyle Aisteach
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