The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz

  My father seemed happy. There was no boring job to weigh him down here, and no rug to obsess about. He turned to me, a smile still luminescent in his eyes. “Do you know why my father went to jail?”

  I froze. It was something we never talked about. Was this a test? One of those questions where an honest answer ended with me screaming under the deluge of his wrath? I gripped the plastic handle sticking out of the tar, mashing my rings into my hands, pressing nerve into bone.

  Of course I had wondered about Grandpa’s time in jail. He died when I was little, but was never far from my father’s mind as the reason for all his unhappiness. Looking into the black muck of the display, I tried not to move any muscles in my face. Maybe he would forget that he’d asked and we could go back to making fun of the dusty woolly mammoth display.

  “He was smart, but he was lazy.” Except for the pronoun, it was the exact thing my father always said about me. “He always got tired of whatever he was doing when it got hard. He went from job to job, you know? First he was selling birdcages, then musical instruments. And somehow he always had money to start a new business. Then one day the police showed up at our house. I was nine. It turned out he’d been burning his shops down for the insurance.” My father paused, the lines in his face erased by a taut bitterness. I could see the little boy he’d been, innocent and outraged. “He was an arsonist, and it was … you know the term ‘Jewish lightning’?”

  I didn’t.

  “It’s a myth, that Jews burn their shops down for the insurance money and blame a lightning strike. Like the myth that we have horns, or we killed Jesus. But there he was, an actual kike firebug.” My father spat the words. “The judge thought he was going to save all the good Christians of Los Angeles from us. Nobody was hurt, but the cops charged my father with aggravated arson, which is normally only for situations where people were killed or injured. But my dad used a timer device to set the fire, and that technically made it ‘aggravated.’ So his sentence went from three years to ten. I didn’t see him again until after I married your mom.”

  I was shocked. I barely remembered my grandparents. They were two old people with thick accents who died before I was old enough to hold a conversation with them. “But how did you get the auto shop?”

  “One of his business partners covered for us, pretended he’d bought the whole thing from my father. He let your grandmother and me work there so your uncles could eat. And then he cut me in for half when I turned eighteen.”

  “I didn’t know that.” I met his eyes awkwardly.

  “That’s why we have to push you not to be lazy, Beth. I worry you want to get things the easy way. You spend so much time with your friends that it interferes with your studies.”

  It was his usual accusation, and it never failed to paralyze me with frustrated rage. But this time, in this context, it meant something different. He was trying to warn me somehow, or maybe warn his dad retroactively through me. Don’t light things on fire. Don’t leave.

  “Let’s look at something else.” I pointed ahead of us, where a team of researchers cleaned fossils behind a floor-to-ceiling glass window.

  “What are they doing with those piles of dirt?” My father seemed glad to focus on something else too. “Shouldn’t they be looking at bones?”

  “Actually that’s not dirt—they’re sorting microfossils.” Excited to explain it to him, I gushed everything I knew. “A bunch of tiny stuff got trapped in the tar along with the mammoths. There are teeth, insects, plants, and shells, and those can all tell us a lot about the Ice Age ecosystem.” I was warming to the topic when a woman next to us interrupted.

  “Not that many people know about microfossils. Are you studying paleontology?”

  “I’m going to study geoscience at UCLA next year.”

  “That’s where I did my undergrad! I’m doing a Ph.D. in paleo now.” The woman pulled her hair back into a scrunchie as she talked, and I realized she was only a few years older than me.

  “Are you studying microfossils?” The world had dropped away, and all I cared about was learning more.

  “Do you know what paleobotany is? I’m studying pollen and seeds from the Pleistocene.” She glanced around conspiratorially. “Do you want to take a peek behind the glass? I can take you in.”

  I barely restrained myself from jumping up and down. “Yes! That would be awesome.”

  She turned to my father. “Are you her dad?”

  “No. I’m … a friend.” His eyes had gone opaque, and he backed away. He hated talking to strangers, and always came up with bizarrely obvious lies to prevent them from knowing anything about him.

  She looked confused, but continued cheerily. “I’m Quan. Do you like fossils too? Want a backstage tour?”

  My father backed up more, his face blank. Quan was freaking him out. He sometimes got like this in unexpected social situations, and I couldn’t predict what he would do. It might be really bad.

  “You know, we should probably get going. Thanks for the offer, though.” I hoped Quan wouldn’t be offended by our abrupt withdrawal. We left her standing next to the lab door I’d been hoping to enter, to see what remained of the Ice Age.

  Somehow we wound up outside, next to the mammoth scene of anguish that had joined us in the past.

  My father cocked his head, eyes cloudless again, and seemed to realize for the first time that he was witnessing a horrifying death. “I guess that’s kind of scary for kids, now that I think about it.”

  “I always thought it was cool.”

  He continued to contemplate the mammoths, then hung his arm around my shoulders. “You are really smart, Beth.” His skin was rough where it touched the back of my neck, and hard with muscle. He gave me a grin I hadn’t seen in a long time. “But I hope you know it’s more than that. You’re talented. You’re not going to be some boring high school science teacher. You’re going to discover something amazing. I bet people will be visiting your museum in a hundred years.”

  I felt proud and sad and suddenly very old. Older than my father, like Tess. I put my arm around his waist and hugged back. “Thanks, Dad.”

  The baby mammoth was still screaming silently. Her father was still trapped. Nothing had changed except me. I no longer believed I could save my own father from whatever was sucking him under.

  * * *

  Soojin was getting really good at playing electric guitar. She screamed and howled on key, too, which meant she could do a reasonable facsimile of Grape Ape’s repertoire. Her parents wouldn’t let her practice at home, though, so we had a perfect excuse to spend lunch in the music room instead of with Lizzy and Heather. Admittedly, it wasn’t as if they were desperate to hang out with us either. We’d all adopted a policy of extreme avoidance. Saying hi in the hallway was fine, but there were no conversations. We were no longer phone friends.

  I’ll never know how Lizzy cleaned up her homicidal mess at the world’s shittiest rock party, but it must have been pretty spectacular. Richard’s death made the L.A. Times, but only as a tiny notice. According to the paper, he’d produced a few albums for Epic, then died tragically after taking a ton of drugs and jumping off the roof of that house into an empty swimming pool. Soojin and I talked about the possibility that maybe the guy who owned the house had covered up the murder. Because how could Lizzy and Heather have dragged that guy up to the roof? And even then—how do you make stab wounds look like injuries from a fall?

  “Rich white men get away with everything!” Soojin half sang, half spoke the words as she played a distorted chord. Then she paused, hanging both arms over the body of her instrument. “Seriously, though, I bet this shit happens all the time. Cops don’t care.”

  “But when a rich white man dies, doesn’t that kind of invalidate the whole equation? Shouldn’t the cops try way too hard to solve his murder?” We’d discussed this a million times, and it had become a kind of ritual to mull it over again.

  “Then it’s about who is richer. Dude who owns the house is supe
r rich. Dude who dies in his house is like … junior rich. My mom says that back in Korea, you could get out of anything if you paid the cops a big enough bribe. I bet it’s the same here. Super rich defeats junior rich.” She smacked a fist into her palm, like she was squashing a bug.

  “Have you talked to Heather or Lizzy at all?”

  “Nooooo.” Soojin fiddled with the knobs on her Boss DS-1 effects pedal, stepped on it with her boot, and played an intensely fuzzed-out chunk of sound.

  For a few weeks after the party, Lizzy called both of us almost every day. She was apologetic and weepy. She begged me to meet her and Heather at Bob’s Big Boy and talk it over. Every time I found myself about to give in, I remembered the expression on Tess’s face—my face—when she said Lizzy was a bad person. Tess had also said she wanted to save me from something worse than the murders. Which didn’t make sense, because what could be worse than that? I kept coming up with increasingly repulsive answers to that question, and none of them made me want to talk to Lizzy.

  I listened to Soojin practice snatches of a Bratmobile song and pulled out my AP Geology textbook. Normally I wanted to learn everything I could about plate tectonics, but today that meeting with Tess was itching at the back of my mind. Had I averted the disaster she’d warned me about by dumping Lizzy as a friend? Why had Tess come back to warn me, instead of stopping Lizzy directly? Maybe she didn’t care about saving a bunch of skeevy guys? I hoped that wasn’t why. I mean, those guys were definitely giant bags of dicks, but they didn’t deserve to die.

  How the hell had I gone from being a kid who liked rocks to a murderer who traveled through time?

  Staring at my textbook, I tried to imagine what the history of my family would look like as a geological time scale illustration. Over on the far left of the page, there would be a colorful hail of arrows representing the geophysical forces that made my grandfather decide to light his store on fire. In the next panel, we would see how those forces affected an underwater volcanic province, an angry red blob beneath the surface the planet, oozing upward into my father’s brain like spreading lava. Then there would be an explanation of the chemistry involved. Nasty-looking clouds of greenhouse gases from the eruption bubbled up from the deep water, changing the composition of our atmosphere, raising temperatures, causing drought. My father’s eruption left the parched land prone to massive forest fires. And that’s where I lived. The world around me was still burning because of crustal formation on the Atlantic seabed millions of years ago. Maybe Tess was the person I would become because of what my father had done to me, somewhere between the boiling waters and the soot forests.

  “Wake up, weirdo.” Soojin waved her hand in front of my eyes. The bell for fifth period was blatting from the loudspeakers.

  I walked to AP Geology in a daze, wondering whether I’d ever see Tess again. Would I grow up into her, and have to come back in time to visit myself? From what I’d learned in our unit on time travel, that was fake movie pseudoscience. It was more like her visit had reshuffled the timeline, generating a new history and future in its wake. Only Tess would remember the timeline that existed before her edit.

  I wished she would come back. I had so many questions.

  TWENTY

  TESS

  Chicago, Illinois … Raqmu, Ottoman-occupied territory (1893 C.E.)

  Sol was right about getting an injunction. None of the theaters had to shut their doors. As soon as Comstock and the Lady Managers filed their complaint, Sol was at the courthouse getting an order to stop it. The Midway was making good money, drawing more tourists to Chicago than ever before in its history. After the newspaper coverage of our protest, there was no way that local judges were going to let some fusty New Yorker try to ruin the city’s new status as an international attraction. Our edit was propagating outward, turning Comstock’s campaign into fruitless foolishness rather than the moral crackdown and mass closures of the villages that I remembered from history books.

  “It worked! We won!” Salina raised a glass of imported pomegranate juice in the dressing room, while Soph poured champagne for those of us who drank alcohol.

  Morehshin sighed heavily. “We won this battle. But we’ve made Comstock angry. He’s not going to let this go.”

  I took a swig of sour bubbles and looked at her uneasily. We’d made an edit, but that didn’t mean we’d made a difference yet.

  Aseel poured a little champagne into her juice. “At least he’s back in New York.”

  That was hardly reassuring. Comstock had ways of turning New York into a monster whose tentacles reached everywhere in the nation. After all, he was a special agent with the U.S. Postal Service. As our friends celebrated, paranoia needled me. I wondered who else was listening at the door, or opening our mail.

  * * *

  After appearing in the pages of New York World, Soph achieved a new level of notoriety. The danse du ventre was becoming a national obsession, and her article was one of the only decent descriptions of it written in English. A local Chicago press printed up two hundred more copies, selling them as pamphlets with crisp covers. Her parlors were full of new acolytes seeking enlightenment.

  One evening in late August, Soph told us proudly that artists and writers from across the world were corresponding with her about the pamphlet. Aseel, Morehshin, and I were in her parlors, having a smoke before bedtime. Troubled, I touched Soph’s arm. “Aren’t you worried about sending it through the mail?”

  Her face fell into seriousness. “Of course. But isn’t this what we wanted? Now people can decide for themselves whether the danse du ventre is obscene, instead of having Anthony decree it from his infernal throne.”

  Aseel was anxious. “That’s true, but maybe you should stop using the mail to talk about it.”

  “Don’t ever forget that Comstock wants you to die,” Morehshin added.

  Soph laughed defiantly. “I’m not going to be quiet anymore.”

  I shot a glance at her, thinking of how Comstock bragged that he’d driven abortionists to suicide. Soph’s friend was one of them. She was putting up a brave front, but clearly she knew the risks.

  Morehshin grunted and stubbed out her cigarette. “If he kills you, then you’ll have no choice but to be quiet.”

  “May the goddess protect us.”

  “What do you really know about the goddess?” Morehshin sounded like she was asking a technical question, not a mystical one.

  “I have devoted my life to study of the goddess in all her forms. I do not pretend to know her will, but I think I know her benevolence.” Her pale cheeks flushed. “Do people in your time still study the ancient Nabataean inscriptions devoted to her?”

  “Yes. At Raqmu.” Morehshin nodded.

  “I spent years there in the libraries and archives, learning ancient Nabataean, Greek, and Arabic. That’s where I began my career.”

  I sat up, suddenly intrigued. “How did you come to do that?”

  “My mother was a very devout woman, and she raised me by herself. We spent many nights with the Bible, and though I would not call her a compassionate woman—” Soph’s voice cracked and she took a quick drink. “Though perhaps she was not kind, she was progressive in her own way. She taught me that God came from a time in the universe before gender and sex. Our pronouns could not encompass God. And so when I came of age, I left our home in Massachusetts and went in search of a different kind of God.”

  “You went all the way to Raqmu?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice. “How could you afford that?”

  Aseel shot me a nasty look and Morehshin wore an offended expression. I felt terrible as soon as I realized how my question sounded.

  Soph held her head high. “I read fortunes. I told men what they wanted to hear. I did what I had to do.”

  “I’m sorry, Soph. I didn’t mean it that way. I was curious because you took an unusual path.”

  She touched my arm gently, and the tension was broken. “I accept your apology. I rarely met other wome
n during my studies, so I know it is rare. I have been blessed.”

  Morehshin rubbed her chin and turned to me. “Another woman who does not follow the rules of her time. We are a good cluster.”

  “I’m glad you approve.” Soph said it gravely, but with the hint of a smile.

  * * *

  Later that night, I awoke to the sound of shouting. I stepped into the hallway to find two police officers banging on Soph’s doors. Morehshin shoved me out of the way and approached the men from behind, pinching her jumper closed with one hand. Her other hand was a glowing red fist.

  “You’re under arrest for obscenity, Sophronia Collins! Come out now or we will use force!”

  As Morehshin reached them, Soph flung open her door. She was fully dressed in the bridal gown she sometimes wore when invoking the goddess. Her hair spilled in blond tangles down her shoulders, making her look wild and dangerous. “There is no need for violence! I will come with you willingly because I have done nothing wrong.”

  Glimpsing Morehshin behind the police, Soph gave a minute shake of her head. The multi-tool stopped glowing, but I noticed that Morehshin did not put it away.

  Despite her promise of cooperation, the police grabbed Soph roughly and put her in heavy iron handcuffs. “What’s this getup, whore?”

  “It pleases the goddess.”

  “Tell that to the judge.” One of the men guffawed. “He’ll see the slut under your white lace.” They gripped her arms and practically lifted her aloft in their enthusiasm to drag her down the hallway. Then they noticed Morehshin. “Is this your pet monkey girl? Hey, monkey, monkey!” Morehshin ignored them and kept her eyes on Soph, who was mouthing something.