Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (2 page)

Lydia wasn't really a pirate, though she did work at a pirate-themed adult book-store near the interstate called the Lusty Doubloon, with the O's in "Doubloon" forming the absurdly globular breasts of its tricorner-hatted mascot. Lydia got pretty tired of shooting down pick-up lines from the type of men who couldn't figure out how to find porn on the internet. Something about Lydia's dishwater-blonde hair and smattering of monster tattoos apparently did it for those guys. The shower in Lydia's studio apartment was always pretty revolting, because the smell of bleach or Lysol reminded her of the video booths at work.

Anyway, after that, Lydia started sticking around for Time Travel Club every week, as a chaser for her twelve-step meeting. It helped get her back on an even keel so she could drive home without shivering so hard she couldn't see the road. She even started hanging out with Malik and Jerboa socially—Malik was willing to quit talking about palm wine around her, and they all started going out for fancy tea at the place at the mall, the one that put the leaves inside a paper satchel that you had to steep for exactly five minutes or everything would be ruined. Lydia and Jerboa went to an all-ages concert together, and didn't care that they were about ten years older than everybody else there—they'd obviously misaligned the temporal stabilizers and arrived too late, but still just in time. "Just in time" was Jerboa's favorite catchphrase, and it was never said without a glimpse of sharp little teeth, a vigorous nod and a widening of Jerboa's brown-green eyes.

For six months, the Time Travelers' meeting slowly became Lydia's favorite thing every week, and these weirdos became her particular gang. Until one day, Madame Alberta showed up and brought the one thing that's guaranteed to ruin any Time Travel Club ever: an actual working time machine.

Lydia's one-year coin was exactly where Jerboa had said it would be: on the roof of the house next door to Madame Alberta's, nestled in some dead leaves in the crook between brick gable and the upward slope of rooftop. She managed to borrow the neighbor's ladder, by sort of explaining. The journey through the space/time continuum didn't seem to have messed up Lydia's coin at all, but it had gotten a layer of grime from sitting overnight. She cleaned it with one of the sanitizing wipes at work, before returning it to its usual front pocket.

About a week later, Lydia met up with Malik and Jerboa for bubble tea at this place in the Asian Mall, where they also served peanut honey toast and squid balls and stuff. Lydia liked the feeling of the squidgy tapioca blobs gliding up the fat straw and then falling into her teeth. Alien larvae. Never to hatch. Alien tadpoles squirming to death in her tummy.

None of them had shown up for Time Travel Club the previous night. Normando had called them all in a panic, wanting to know where everybody was. Somehow Malik had thought Jerboa would show up, and Jerboa had figured Lydia would stick around after her other meeting.

"It's just..." Malik looked into his mug of regular old coffee, with a tragic expression accentuated by hot steam. "What's the point of sharing our silly make-believe stories about being time-travelers, when we built an actual real time machine, and it was no good?"

"Well, the machine worked," Jerboa said, looking at the dirty cracked tile floor. "It's just that you can't actually use it to visit the past or the future, in person. Lydia's coin was displaced upward at an angle of about thirty-six degrees by the Earth's rotation and orbit around the sun. The further forward and backward in time you go, the more extreme the spatial displacement, because the distance traveled is the
square
of the time traveled. Send something an hour and a half forward in time, and you'd be over four hundred kilometers away from Earth. Or deep underground, depending on the time of day."

"So if we wanted to travel a few years ahead," Lydia said, "we would need to send a spaceship. So it could fly back to Earth from wherever it appeared."

"I doubt you'd be able to transport an object that size," said Jerboa. "From what Madame Alberta explained, anything more than about two hundred and sixteen cubic feet or about two hundred pounds, and the energy costs go up exponentially." Madame Alberta hadn't answered the door when Lydia went to get her coin back. None of them had heard from Madame Alberta since then, either.

Not only that, but once you were talking about traversing years rather than days, then other factors—such as the Sun's acceleration toward the center of the galaxy and the galaxy's acceleration toward the Virgo Supercluster—came more into play. You might not ever find the Earth again.

They all sat for a long time, listening to the Canto-Pop and their own internal monologues about failure. Lydia was thinking that an orbit is a fragile thing, after all. You take centripetal force for granted at your peril. She could see Malik, Jerboa, and herself preparing to drift away from each other once and for all. Free to follow their separate trajectories. Separate futures. She had a clawing certainty that this was the last time the three of them would ever see each other, and she was going to lose the Time Travel Club forever.

And then it hit her, a way to turn this into something good. And keep the group together.

"Wait a minute," said Lydia. "So we don't have a machine that lets a person visit the past or future. But don't people spend kind of a lot of money to launch objects into space? Like, satellites and stuff?"

"Yes," said Jerboa. "It costs tons of money just to lift a pound of material out of our gravity well." And then for the first time that day, Jerboa looked up from the floor and shook off the curtain of black hair so you could actually see the makings of a grin. "Oh. Yeah. I see what you're saying. We don't have a time machine; we have a cheap simple way to launch things into space. You just send something a few hours into the future, and it's in orbit. We can probably calculate exact distances and trajectories, with a little practice. The hard part will be achieving a stable orbit."

"So?" Malik said. "I don't see how that helps anything.... Oh. You're suggesting we turn this into a money-making opportunity."

Lydia couldn't help thinking of the fact that her truck needed an oil change and a new headpipe and four new tires and the ability to start when she turned the key in the ignition. And she needed never to go near the Lusty Doubloon again. "It's better than nothing," she said. "Until we figure out what else this machine can do."

"Look at it this way," Jerboa said to Malik. "If we are able to launch a payload into orbit on a regular basis, then that's a repeatable result. A repeatable result is the first step toward being able to do something else. And we can use the money to reinvest in the project."

"Well," Malik said. And then he broke out into a smile too. Radiant. "If we can talk Madame Alberta into it, then sure."

They phoned Madame Alberta a hundred times and she never picked up. At last, they just went to her house and kept banging on the door until she opened up.

Madame Alberta was drunk. Not just regular drunk, but long-term drunk. Like she had gotten drunk a week ago, and never sobered up. Lydia took one look at her, one whiff of the booze fumes, and had to go outside and dry heave. She sat, bent double, on Madame Alberta's tiny lawn, almost within view of the St. Ignatius College science lab that they'd stolen all that gear from a few months earlier. From inside the house, she heard Malik and Jerboa trying to explain to Madame Alberta that they had figured out what happened to the coin. And how they could turn it into kind of a good thing.

They were having a hard time getting through to her. Madame Alberta's fauxropean accent was basically gone, and she sounded like a bitter old drunk lady from New Jersey who just wanted to drink herself to death.

Eventually, Malik came out and put one big hand gently on Lydia's shoulder. "You should go home," he said. "Jerboa and I will help her sober up, and then we'll talk her through this. I promise we won't make any decisions until you're there to take part."

Lydia nodded and got in her rusty old Ford, which rattled and groaned and finally came to a semblance of life long enough to let her roll back down the highway to her crappy apartment. Good thing it was pretty much downhill all the way.

When Madame Alberta first visited the Time Travel Club, nobody quite knew what to make of her. She had olive skin, black hair, and a black beauty mark on the left side of her face, which tended to change its location every time Lydia saw her. And she wore a dark headscarf, or maybe a snood, and a long black dress with a slit up one side.

That first meeting, her Eurasian accent was the thickest and fakest it would ever be: "I have the working theory of the time machine. And the prototype that is, how you say, half-built. I need a few more pairs of hands to help me complete the assembly, but also I require the ethical advice."

"Like a steering committee," said Jerboa, perking up with a quick sideways head motion.

"Even so," said Madame Alberta. "Much like the Unitarian Church upstairs, the time machine has need of a steering committee."

At first, everybody assumed Madame Alberta was just sharing her own time-travel fantasy—albeit one that was a lot more elaborate, and involved a lot more delayed gratification, than everybody else's. Still, the rest of the meeting was sort of muted. Lydia was all set to share her latest experiences with solar-sail demolition derby, the most dangerous sport that would ever exist. And Malik was having drama with the Babylonians, either in the past or the future, Lydia wasn't sure which. But Madame Alberta had a quiet certainty that threw the group out of whack.

"I leave you now," said Madame Alberta, bowing and curtseying in a single weird arm-sweeping motion that made her appear to be the master of a particularly esoteric drunken martial arts style. "Take the next week to discuss my proposition. Be aware, though: This will be the most challenging of ventures." She whooshed out of the room, long flowy dress trailing behind her.

Nobody actually spent the week between meetings debating whether they wanted to help Madame Alberta build her time machine—instead, Lydia kept asking the other members whether they could find an excuse to kick her out of the group. "She freaks me out, man," Lydia said on the phone to Malik on Sunday evening. "She seems for real mentally not there."

"I don't know," Malik said. "I mean, we've never kicked anybody out before. There was that one guy who seemed like he had a pretty serious drug problem last year, with his whole astral projection shtick. But he stopped coming on his own, after a couple times."

"I just don't like it," said Lydia. "I have a terrible feeling she's going to ruin everything." She didn't add that she really needed this group to continue the way it was, that these people were becoming her only friends, and the only reason she felt like the future might actually really exist for her. She didn't want to get needy or anything.

"Eh," said Malik. "It's a time travel club. If she becomes a problem, we'll just go back in time and change our meeting place last year, so she won't find us."

"Good point."

It was Jerboa who found the article in the Berkeley
Daily Voice—
a physics professor who lectured at Berkeley and also worked at Lawrence Livermore had gone missing in highly mysterious circumstances, six months earlier. And the photo of the vanished Professor Martindale—dark hair, laughing gray eyes, narrow mouth—looked rather a lot like Madame Alberta, except without any beauty mark or giant scarf.

Jerboa emailed the link to the article to Lydia and Malik. "Do you think...?" the email read.

The next meeting came around. Besides the three core members and Madame Alberta, there was Normando, who had finally tracked down that hippie chick in 1973 and was now going on the same first date with her over and over again, arriving five minutes earlier each time to pick her up. Lydia did not think that would actually work in real life.

The others waited until Normando had run out of steam describing his latest interlude with Starshine Ladyswirl and wandered out to smoke a (vaguely postcoital) cigarette, before they started interrogating Madame Alberta. How did this alleged time machine work? Why was she building it in her laundry room instead of at a proper research institution? Had she absconded from Berkeley with some government-funded research, and if so were they all going to jail if they helped her?

"Let us say, for the sake of the argument," Madame Alberta played up her weird accent even as her true identity as a college professor from Camden was brought to light, "that I had developed some of the theory of the time travel while on the payroll of the government. Yes? In that hypothetical situation, what would be the ethical thing to do? You are my steering committee, please to tell me."

"Well," Malik said. "I don't know that you want the government to have a time machine."

"Yeah, yeah," Jerboa said. "They already have warrantless wiretaps and indefinite detention. Imagine if they could go back in time and spy on you in the past. Or kill people as little children."

"Well, but," Lydia said. "I mean, wouldn't it still be your responsibility to share your research?" But the others were already on Madame Alberta's side.

"As to how it works," Madame Alberta reached into her big black trenchcoat and pulled out a big rolled-up set of plans covered in equations and drawings, which meant nothing to anybody. "Shall we say that it was the accidental discovery? One was actually working on a project for the Department of Energy aimed at finding a way to eliminate the atomic waste. And instead, one stumbled on a method of using spent uranium to create an opening two Planck lengths wide, lasting a few fractions of a microsecond, with the other end a few seconds in the future."

"Uh huh," Lydia said. "So... you could create a wormhole too tiny to see, that only allowed you to travel a few seconds forward in time. That's, um... useful, I guess."

"But then! One discovers that one might be able to generate a much larger temporal rift, opting out of the fundamental forces, and it would be stable enough to move a person or a moderate-sized object either forward or backward in time, anywhere from a few minutes to a few thousand years, in the exact same physical location," said Madame Alberta. "One begins to panic, imagining this power in the hands of the government. This is all the hypothetical situation, of course. In reality, one knows nothing of this Professor Martindale of whom you speaks."