Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (4 page)

"So what happened?" Jerboa said.

"In the end, it wasn't anything I did during a blackout that caused everything to implode," Lydia said. "It was what I did to keep myself from ever having another blackout. I got to work early one day, and I just lit a bonfire in the fancy conference room. And I threw all the contents of the company's wet bar into it."

Once again, nobody talked for a while. Malik turned the engine on and off a couple of times, which made it about seven minutes of silence. They were parked by the side of the road, and every once in a while a car simmered past.

"I think that's what makes us such good time travelers, actually." Jerboa's voice cracked a little bit, and Lydia was surprised to see the outlines of tears on that small brown face, in the light of a distant highway detour sign. "We are very experienced at being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and at doing whatever it takes to get ourselves to the right place, and the right time."

Lydia put her arm around Jerboa, who was sitting in the middle of the front seat, and Jerboa leaned into Lydia's shoulder so just a trace of moisture landed on Lydia's neck.

"You wouldn't believe the places I've had to escape from in the middle of the night," Jerboa said. "The people who tried to fix my, my... irregularities. You wouldn't believe the methods that have been tried. People can justify almost anything, if their perspective is limited enough."

Malik wrapped his hand on Jerboa's back, so it was like all three of them were embracing. "We've all had our hearts broken, I guess," he said. "I was a teacher, in one of those Teach For America-style programs. I thought we were all in this together, that we had a shared code. I thought we were altruists. Until they threw me under a bus."

And it was then that Malik said the thing about wanting to stand outside history and see the gears grinding from a distance, all of the cruelty and all of the edifices that had been built on human remains. The true power wouldn't be changing history, or even seeing how it turned out, but just seeing the shape of the wheel.

They sat for a good long time in silence again. The engine ticked a little. They stayed leaning into each other, as the faceplates watched.

Lydia started to say something like, "I just want to hold on to this moment. Here, now, with the two of you. I don't care about whatever else, I just want
this
to last." But just as she started to speak, Madame Alberta tapped on the passenger-side window, right next to Lydia's head, and gestured at her car, which was parked in front of theirs. It was time to suit up, and go get some nuclear waste.

Lydia didn't see Malik or Jerboa for a month or so after Madame Alberta told her weird story about Europe getting nuked. MJL Aerospace shuttered its offices, and Lydia saw the rocket picture in a dumpster as she drove to the Lucky Doubloon. She redoubled her commitment to going to a twelve-step meeting every goddamn day. She finally called her mom back, and went to a few bluegrass concerts.

Lydia got the occasional panicked call from Normando, or even one of the other semi-regulars, wondering what happened to the club, but she just ignored it.

Until one day Lydia was driving to work, on the day shift again, and she saw Jerboa walking on the side of the road. Jerboa kicked the shoulder of the road over and over, kicking dirt and rocks, not looking ahead. Hips and knees jerking almost out of their sockets. Inaudible curses spitting at the gravel.

Lydia pulled over next to Jerboa and honked her horn a couple of times, then rolled down the window. "Come on, get in." She turned down the bluegrass on her stereo.

Jerboa gave a gesture between a wave and a "go away."

"Listen, I screwed up," Lydia said. "That aerospace thing was a really bad idea. It wasn't about the money, though, you have to believe me about that. I just wanted to give us a new project, so we wouldn't drift apart."

"It's not your fault." Jerboa did not get in the truck. "I don't blame you."

"Well, I blame myself. I was being selfish. I just didn't want you guys to run away. I was scared. But we need to figure out a way to turn the space travel back into time travel. We can't do that, unless we work together."

"It's just not possible," Jerboa said. "For any amount of time displacement beyond a few hours, the variables get harder and harder to calculate. The other day, I did some calculations and figured out that if you traveled a hundred years into the future, you'd wind up around one-tenth of a light year away. That's just a back-of-the-envelope thing, based on our orbit around the Sun."

"Okay, so one problem at a time." Lydia stopped her engine, gambling that it would restart. The bluegrass stopped mid-phrase. "We need to get some accurate measurements of exactly where stuff ends up, when we send it forward and backward in time. But to do that, first we need to be able to send stuff out, and get it back again."

"There's no way," Jerboa said. "It's strictly a one-way trip."

"We'll figure out a way," Lydia said. "Trial and error. We just need to open a second rift close enough to the first rift to bring our stuff back. Yeah? Once we're good enough, we send people. And eventually, we send people, along with enough equipment to build a telescope in deep space, so we can spy on Earth in the distant past or the far future."

"There are so many steps in there, it's ridiculous," Jerboa said. "Every one of those steps might turn out to be just as impossible as the satellite thing turned out to be. We can't do this with just the four of us, we don't have enough pairs of hands. Or enough expertise."

"That's why we recruit," said Lydia. "We need to find a ton more people who can help us make this happen."

"Except," said Jerboa, fists clenched and eyes red and pinched, "we can't trust just any random people with this. Remember? That's why Madame Alberta brought it to us in the first place, because the temptation to abuse this power would be too great. You could destroy a city with this machine. How on Earth do we find a few dozen people who we can trust with this?"

"The same way we found each other," Lydia said. "The same way Madame Alberta found us. The Time Travel Club."

Jerboa finally got into the truck and snapped the seatbelt into place. Nodding slowly, like thinking it over.

Ricky from Garbo.com showed up at a meeting of the Time Travel Club, several months later. He didn't even realize at first that these were the same people from MJL Aerospace—maybe he'd seen the articles about the club on the various nerd blogs, or maybe he'd seen Malik's appearance on the basic cable TV show GeekUp! Or maybe he'd listened to one of their podcasts. They were doing lots and lots of things to expand the membership of the club, without giving the slightest hint about what went on in Madame Alberta's laundry room.

Garbo.com had gone under by now, and Ricky was in grad school. He'd shaved off the big sideburns and wore square Elvis Costello glasses now.

"So I heard this is like a LARP, sort of," Ricky said to Lydia as they were getting a cookie from the cookie table before the meeting started—they'd had to move the meetings from the Unitarian basement to a middle school basketball court, now that they had a few dozen members. Scores of folding chairs, in rows, facing a podium. And they had a cookie table. "You make up your time travel stories, and everybody pretends they're true. Right?"

"Sort of," Lydia said. "You'll see. Once the meeting starts, you cannot say anything about these stories not being true. Okay? It's the only real rule."

"Sure thing," Ricky said. "I can do that. I worked for a dotcom startup, remember? I'm good at make-believe."

And Ricky turned out to be one of the more promising new recruits, weirdly enough. He spent a lot of time going to the eighteenth century and teaching Capability Brown about
feng shui.
Which everybody agreed was probably a good thing for the Enlightenment.

Just a few months after that, Lydia, Malik, and Jerboa found themselves already debating whether to show Ricky the laundry room. Lydia was snapping her third-hand spacesuit into place in Madame Alberta's sitting room, with its caved-in sofa and big-screen TV askew. Lydia was happy to obsess over something else, to get her mind off the crazy thing she was about to do.

"I think he's ready," Lydia said of Ricky. "He's committed to the club."

"I would certainly like to see his face when he finds out how we were really going to launch that satellite into orbit," said Malik, grinning.

"It's too soon," Jerboa said. "I think we ought to wait six months, as a rule, before bringing anyone here. Just to make sure someone is really in tune with the group, and isn't going to go trying to tell the wrong people about this. This technology has an immense potential to distort your sense of ethics and your values."

Lydia tried to nod, but it was hard now that the bulky collar was in place. This spacesuit was a half a size too big, with boots that Lydia's feet slid around in. The crotch of the orange suit was almost M.C. Hammer wide on her, even with the adult diaper they'd insisted she should wear just in case. The puffy white gloves swallowed her fingers. And then Malik and Jerboa lowered the helmet into place, and Lydia's entire world was compressed to a gray tinted rectangle. Goodbye, peripheral vision.

She wondered what sort of tattoo she would get to commemorate this trip. "Ten minutes," Madame Alberta called from the laundry room. And indeed, it was ten to midnight.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Jerboa said. "It's not too late to call it off."

"I'm the only one this suit sort of fits," Lydia said. "And I'm the most expendable. And yes. I do want to be the first person to travel through time."

After putting so many weird objects into that cube, thousands of them before they'd managed to get a single one back, Lydia felt strange about clambering inside the cube herself. She had to hunch over a bit. Malik waved and Jerboa gave a tiny thumbs up. Betty the Cyborg from the Dawn of Time checked the instruments one last time. Steampunk Fred gave a thumbs up on the calculations. And Madame Alberta reached for the clunky lever. Even through her helmet, Lydia heard a greedy soda-belch sound.

A thousand years later, Lydia lost her hold on anything. She couldn't get her footing. There was no footing to get. She felt ill immediately. She'd expected the micro-gravity, but it still made her feel revolting. She felt drunk, actually. Like she didn't know which way was up. She spun head over ass. If she drifted too far, they would never pull her back. But the tiny maneuvering thrusters on her suit were useless, because she had no reference point. She couldn't see a damn thing through this foggy helmet, just blackness. She couldn't find the Sun, or any stars, for a moment. Then she made out stars. And more stars.

She spun. And somersaulted. No control at all. Until she tried the maneuvering thrusters, the way Jerboa had explained. She attempted to turn a full three-sixty, so she could try and locate the Sun. She had to remember to breathe normally. Every part of her wanted to hyperventilate.

When she'd turned halfway around on her axis, she didn't see the Sun. But she saw something else. At first, she couldn't even make sense of it. There were lights blaring at her. And things moving. And shapes. She took a few photos with the camera Malik had given her. The whole mass was almost spherical, maybe egg-shaped. But there were jagged edges. As Lydia stared, she made out more details. Like, one of the shapes on the outer edge was the hood of a 1958 Buick, license plate and all. There were pieces of a small passenger airplane bolted on as well, along with a canopy made of some kind of shiny blue material that Lydia had never seen before. It was just a huge collection of junk welded together, protection against cosmic rays and maybe also decoration.

Some of the moving shapes were people. They were jumping up and down. And waving at Lydia. They were behind a big observation window at the center of the egg, a slice of see-through material. They gestured at something below the window. Lydia couldn't make it out at first. Then she squinted and saw that it was a big glowy sign with blocky letters made of massive pixels.

At first, Lydia thought the sign read, "WELCOME TIME TRAVEL CLUB." Like they knew the Time Travel Club was coming, and they wanted to prepare a reception committee.

Then she squinted again, just as another rift started opening up to pull her back, a purple blaze all around her, and she realized she had missed a word. The sign actually read, "WELCOME TO TIME TRAVEL CLUB." They were all members of the Club, too, and they were having another meeting. And they were inviting her to share her story, any way she could.

Thanks to Dr. Dave Goldberg for trouble-shooting the physics. Thanks also to Rochelle Underwood, Bruce White, Karen Burnham, and David Calkins for advice on aerospace issues. And thanks to Naamen Tilahun and Liz Henry for feedback!

GROUNDED

Meg Pontecorvo
| 9330 words

A writer and artist who sees no contradictions in her dedication to multiple genres, Meg Pontecorvo grew up in the Midwest and now lives in San Francisco with her partner and cats. She earned an MFA in Poetry Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and is a 2010 graduate of Odyssey Workshop. Meg has published a book of poetry, and her artwork in collage and pen has been featured in experimental generative video performances in the Bay Area. Her first published story is about an unmanageable teenager, her dangerous environment, and what it truly means to be...

The petals drifted down from the sky, like the confetti we tossed at Dad and Becca's wedding—except these were white and big as my thumbnail. They started falling right after eighth period and stuck to the raised letters on the big sign outside the main doors. By the time Clare and I left only the capital "M" showed in "Lincoln Middle School." We ditched the quarantine bus and walked home instead, swirling our hands to make the petals dance. Clare fell on her butt, and I scooped up handfuls and dumped them on her, and she shrieked and threw them back. I scooped up another handful and was about to toss it when a horn honked. It was Mom, on her way home early from work. She must have figured I'd want to play in the petals—it was a beautiful day, spring in January.