Chronica (2 page)

Sierra looked at the screen and nodded. "That was one of the texts we rescued from Alexandria and left with Mr. Appleton." The screen was on a stud Max had been wearing on his jeans. It was the size of an archaic postage stamp, which expanded to the size of his hand as he held it in his palm. They had picked one up for each of them, likely greatly overpriced, at a shop that catered to tourists on Fifth Avenue. They paid with their retina scans, still attached to their still active bank accounts from 2042.

"Biden said it taught him something about connecting to the people, which served him in good stead in the Democratic primaries in 2008, which he won." Max clucked his tongue. "Amazing. What else has changed?"

"No way to find out except by living here a little," Sierra said, profoundly shaken.

"And the reason why the two of us still remember our original reality?" Max asked, though he already knew the answer. But he found it reassuring to hear it, anyway, from Sierra, his partner in this something other than sanity.

"Because we came from Reality 1, in which Biden was Obama's Vice President from 2008-2016," Sierra replied. "Our actions in the past created Reality 2, but since we're still from Reality 1, we remember it."

"That makes sense," Max said, and breathed out slowly. "I guess the other big question now is what should we do about it?"

***

They awoke the next morning, legs and arms entwined, neither at first aware of where they were, except together in bed.
 

But reality came quickly upon them. "We knew something like this would happen," Max said, stroking Sierra's hair, kissing her, and arising from the bed. He reached for his clothes, crumpled on the chair.

"No," Sierra said, about the clothes. "We need something 21
^st
century."

"Right, of course," Max said, and went for a suitcase with the new clothing they had quickly purchased at the tourist-trap store on Fifth Avenue yesterday. They had arrived there from the Millennium Club a few blocks up the street, about 10 minutes before the store closed. "But there was no point in rescuing the Aristotle scrolls from the Library," Max said, returning to his initial thought, "if we didn't want them to change our world in some way, with any luck for the better."

"I know," Sierra said, not particularly happy, but not unhappy either, just still in some kind of shock, Max thought. He enjoyed looking at her, enjoyed watching her pull undergarments and jeans and shirt out of the suitcase, enjoyed watching her put them on almost as much as he enjoyed her taking them off.

"You think Biden as President is a change for the worse?" Max asked her.

"No, it's not that," Sierra said. "At least, not from what I know of our original history, in which Biden was a good enough Vice President under Obama. It's . . . I don't know, it's the magnitude of the change. Biden rather than Obama as President is world-changing, or could have been. We'll have to see . . . . I guess I was just expecting, hoping, that the changes would be more subtle, more, I don't know."

"More under our control?" Max asked.

"Yeah."

"All right," Max said. "There's still a lot that's under our control. Our bank accounts from 2042 are live, we confirmed that yesterday. Let's get breakfast, get out of this hotel, and go to your apartment."

"Expenses are bound to be higher than in 2042," Sierra said.

"True, but our bank accounts have been collecting interest," Max said. "Look, there was an argument in favor of our going to 2042 not 2062, but I took your point about not wanting to run into Socrates or Thomas – Alcibiades – just yet."

"I'm not sure if I ever do," Sierra said.

***

They continued their analysis over breakfast. "It feels good to eat again in our own time, or close to it," Sierra said, sipping a gengineered sour-cherry orange juice.

"Yeah, it does," Max said, digging with zest into the scrambled mini-ostrich egg that he and Sierra were sharing. "You know," he said, savoring the taste but thinking about something else, "it's interesting that you brought a man into the future – Socrates – and he apparently had no effect on our world. But bringing a book into the future did."

"That's for two reasons, probably," Sierra said. "One, I brought Socrates to 2042, which kept him clear of almost all of our past. But the scrolls we rescued from Alexandria percolated through the entire 20
^th
century – giving Joe Biden a chance to read at least one of them."

Max nodded. "And the second reason?"

"Mr. Charles told me that Thomas kept Socrates strictly under wraps," Sierra said, "likely to avoid triggering any changes in future history."

"And likely to keep Socrates to himself," Max added.

"True," Sierra said, and sipped more of her juice.

Max regarded her. The last thing he wanted to do was to start her thinking about Thomas aka Alcibiades. "If you think this new world in which Joe Biden was President is not in humanity's best interests, you could do a re-set, couldn't you?" he asked gently.

"No. I mean, yes, I assume my future self could still make that happen, but I don't think we want to go jumping around time changing history and then changing it back again if we're not comfortable with the results," Sierra said.

"I guess you need to be in closer touch with why you saved the scrolls in the first place," Max said. "If it was to make the world a better place, or the world as it should be, as it would have been, if the scrolls had not been burned, well, this is a beginning, isn't it? Better this than if we found no changes at all, right?"

Sierra wasn't sure she knew. Or, if she did know, and what she knew was that Max was right that surely a change like this was better than no change at all, she still didn't feel good about it, certainly not comfortable. Hadn't someone once told her that comfort was beyond the reach of the time traveler? Maybe she had said that herself. "Maybe this is what Heron was warning us about," was all she said to Max.

"Warning? Last time I checked, he and his legionaries were trying to kill us," Max replied, with some heat.

"To prevent disruptions in time," Sierra said.

"Because he wanted to protect the history and future that he had likely helped to create," Max said. "How do we know that
that's
the best timeline for humanity?"

"We don't," Sierra said. "And you're right, of course." She touched Max's hand. "I'll be ok, don't worry. This change in our reality just hit me harder than I expected. I just need a little time to adjust, I guess." But she also knew she needed to think a lot more about this.

***

Max left to make sure Sierra's apartment from 2042 was still available for them – Sierra had purchased the apartment at some point for a tidy sum she had acquired in the future further along the line, but you never knew when it came to apartments in New York City. Max was also instructed to buy some decent 2062 clothing for the two of them. Sierra knew that he knew what she liked.

Sierra wanted to relax in the hotel atrium with her phone. She could soak in some of what was new in 2062 ambience and do more research online into this new world she had unintentionally helped to create.

She discovered something about two hours later, about five minutes before Max returned. He approached her with two bags filled with clothing and his patented big smile.

"Ted Kennedy died on the day of Biden's first inauguration in 2009 in this reality," was her greeting to Max.

He sat next to her on the neo-wicker seat, designed to automatically hug the right parts of your body, as the digi-sign said. "Didn't he die around then in our reality?" Max asked.

"Yeah, but not on Obama's first inauguration day – Teddy survived until the following summer."

Max nodded.

"My grandmother was a big fan of the Kennedys," Sierra continued. "That was one of the reasons my mother chose Harvard over Princeton when she got her professorship in mathematics."

"Ok," Max said, "so–"

"Well, there's something even more interesting about this," Sierra said. "Ted Kennedy had some problem at the luncheon after Obama's inauguration and he was whisked away in an ambulance, and wrongly reported dead on Wikipedia."

"I don't recall that," Max said.

"You wouldn't," Sierra said. "But it was a big deal in our family. My grandmother always used to cite it as a reason you couldn't trust Wikipedia, even though Teddy's death then was also wrongly reported in other media."

"Yeah, took a decade or two for Wikipedia to achieve its vaunted status, I know that," Max said.
 

"The incorrect report of Ted Kennedy's death was a big deal in Wikipedia's history," Sierra continued. "I read about it in more than one text about the history of social media."

Now Max grew very thoughtful. "I'm beginning to see why you think this incident is so important to what's now going on with us and our travels."

"Exactly," Sierra said. "It's one thing that Aristotle's book changed history and got Biden elected President in 2008. That's earthshaking, as we've been saying. And the change in the date of Ted Kennedy's death is obviously important, too. But, what I'm wondering is why our reality, before we rescued the texts from Alexandria, had the wrong report of his death in January 2009 – why have any incident happening on that day at all?"

"It's almost as if, for some reason, part of the current reality leaked into our original reality," Max said.
 

Sierra nodded. "And does that suggest to you that maybe our current reality has some sort of priority or legitimacy when it comes to the date that Ted Kennedy died?"

"You mean the reality we're now in – Biden President, Ted Kennedy dying on Biden's first inauguration day, Obama elected President in 2020 not 2008 – is somehow the reality that was most meant to be?"

"Yeah, maybe," Sierra replied. "Though I'm not even clear about what exactly that means."

"Well, one thing is pretty clear," Max said. "There's not all that much difference between the two realities, if you look at them a certain way. I mean, Biden was Obama's Vice President, and Ted Kennedy did die in the first year of Obama's first term, in our original reality. Whatever exactly that may mean."

***

Sierra's apartment on 11
^th
Street between 5
^th
Avenue and University Place was fine. Automatic air systems had kept the rooms as fresh for 20 years as if the windows had been open the entire time on an early Spring day. And the neighborhood hadn't changed at all. "This is the first time we've been in this place together since that morning we flew to London, just a few days after you came over here that night in 2042. I had just begun reading the
Andros
dialogue," Sierra said, with a tingle of a tear in her eye.

Max smiled deeply. "And we had a very good time that night, if memory serves."

Sierra took his hand. "Seems like another lifetime, doesn't it?"

"Life may be like that, anyway," Max said. "People often say that when they meet someone they hadn't seen since college, and that has nothing to do with time travel."

Sierra nodded.

"What I find even more amazing than how fresh this apartment smells is how the financial system worked so well for us," Max said, "almost as if the banking system was designed to accommodate time travelers." He laughed.

"I guess people leave money in accounts, unattended, with nothing taken out or put in, all the time," Sierra said. "They passed some law in the 2020s about that, extending into perpetuity the time you could leave money in an account with no activity, just earning whatever interest. My parents were very happy about that, for some reason."

Max resisted saying maybe your parents knew you would go into time travel. He confined himself to saying, "Do you want to go see them?"

"I'm not sure," Sierra said. "They're both still alive and together – and content, as far as I know – but I don't know if I want to draw them into this."

"And attract Heron to them," Max added. "Yeah, I get it. You should think about it."

Max had been orphaned in 2040, a year before she and he had met, Sierra knew, so whether or not to meet his parents now in 2062 was moot. But there was always the option of trying to stop the train crash that took their lives, or getting them off the train, which would be easy, if she and Max decided to do that and went back to 2040. They had briefly talked about that in one of the rare quiet moments they had stolen in their run from Heron.

"I know what you're thinking," Max said. "You're thinking about my parents, and wondering if the Biden Presidency starting in 2008 and the big boost it gave to train travel didn't result in a safer train system, meaning the crash that took my parents didn't happen in this reality."

Sierra looked at him. Actually, that last part hadn't occurred to her at all.

***

They took a robo-cab back up to the Millennium Club. They hadn't been able to look at the library's classical holdings when they'd arrived the previous day, because the area had been undergoing a renovation yesterday. They wanted to see which of the texts they had rescued in addition to Aristotle's treatise on good governance had made it into this future.

Max had searched for his parents online. There indeed had been no train crash as in their original reality, but his mother had died anyway about five years later in a freak car accident in which a robotic automobile had gone awry. "One in a million,"
The New York Times
story said, but it taught Max and Sierra something about the inevitability of death across time-lines – "at least fifty-percent of the time, that we now know of," Max had said, in a husky voice filled with shock, dread, anticipation, and other emotions Sierra could not identify. Max's father was now in Los Angeles, and Max had decided he'd wait at least a few hours to contact him, perhaps by phone, perhaps by flying out there to see his father in person.

Sierra stroked Max's hand in the cab. She understood some of what he was going through, because she had gone through the same unnerving blender of emotion when first she lost him in Londinium in 150 AD and then discovered he hadn't died after all. She tried so hard not to provoke paradox in her journeys, and yet Max was going through the whiplash of its loops right now. But he was right in what he had said to her last night – what did she expect, given their tampering with history by rescuing the scrolls in Alexandria?