The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz

  When Hugayr invited Soph to lie down on the dais between the candles and stones, more women in the room wandered over to sit down, or left discreetly through the doors. At last there was enough of a crowd that it was starting to feel properly ceremonial.

  “All right, everybody, let’s get started.” Hugayr said it with an unmistakably southern American accent from the twentieth century, then switched back into Nabataean. “Welcome, Soph. Your offerings and sacrifice are pleasing to al-Lat, who gives shelter to women and new genders who have been cast out of the time when their mothers birthed them.”

  “Praise be to al-Lat.” Soph spoke in a clear, strong voice.

  “This the most difficult part, so pay attention.” Hugayr addressed the audience. A few had taken out scrolls and ink. I could hear the faint scratching of reed pens on papyrus. Palming two of the stone flowers she’d set out, Hugayr held her fists over Soph’s chest and let out a prolonged cry. “DIE AND LIVE AGAIN!”

  Blue fire enveloped Hugayr’s arms and fell across Soph’s body like lumps of lava. She sucked in her breath and let out an ecstatic scream. My muscles tensed. This looked too much like a real sacrifice, and not the metaphorical one I’d expected. But no one around me was panicking, so this was obviously part of the ritual. I peered more closely. Where had the fire come from? It burned everything, but consumed nothing. That’s when I realized: the stones. They were raining illumination, like Morehshin’s multi-tool. Somehow these ancient priestesses had access to technology from thousands of years in the future. I tried to relax. This was not going to end in carnage. Soph would be fine.

  “CALL THE WATER IN THE ROCKS, SOPH! CALL IT!” Hugayr opened her hands and the stones blazed. Though at first I’d thought they were carved into flowers, perhaps those petals were flames.

  Soph stood up, towering over us, cloaked in fire. “I CALL THE WATER!” The air instantly poured with rain and fog. I could smell the Ordovician again, and through the mist I saw embers dying.

  “Is she going to be okay?” I couldn’t help but whisper it.

  C.L., grinning next to me, practically bounced with glee. “Yes! This place has its own mini-wormhole. You’ll see.”

  Now Soph was floating upward, her hair free around her face. Smoke and steam plumed from the rocks below, where Hugayr gesticulated for her students to clean up spilled wax and water. Soph spun slowly toward the statue of al-Lat as she reached the height of the goddess’s faces. She was fully thirty feet above the dais now. Electricity buzzed around her.

  “GODDESS, DO YOU ACCEPT MY SACRIFICE?”

  A ball of lightning cracked where Soph hung suspended. She winked out, then reappeared on the dais in a burst of seawater.

  “LET DEATH AND LIFE JOIN IN THE BODY OF THE TIMELESS!” Hugayr raised her arms and the air was clear again. I could hear water dripping from Soph’s robe onto the floor. The students were working frantically to soak everything up with sponges and cloth. C.L. applauded enthusiastically, and the rest of us joined in, some snapping fingers or stamping their feet.

  “Nice job, everybody! Very controlled.” Hugayr beamed and folded her arms. “You are now Timeless, Soph! Welcome!”

  Soph grinned and wrung out her hair. I still felt a little shaky, but joined the others swarming her with hugs while students in the audience headed back to work.

  Morehshin eyed the flower-fire stones that Hugayr was slipping back into her robe, then addressed her in a language I couldn’t understand.

  “Is that English?” Hugayr cocked her head, and spoke with her southern accent again. “I’m afraid I only speak Atomic Era.”

  “Where did you get those multi-tools?” Morehshin switched back to Nabataean.

  Hugayr readjusted her shawl and glared at Morehshin. “This temple belongs to the Raqmu women and new genders of its time. Do you understand? We shelter the Timeless, but it is our place. You get no special privileges because you are from the future. If you want to learn our secrets, you must join us and never travel again.”

  Looking sheepish, Morehshin took out her own multi-tool and showed it to Hugayr. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions about this?” Immediately the tension evaporated and they got into a long, muttered discussion about its technical features.

  Ignoring them, C.L. nudged Anita and pointed up to the spot where Soph had been eaten by lightning. “It’s a Machine that only leads to its present. Isn’t that cool? Probably a beta test that somebody forgot to turn off half a billion years ago.”

  “What makes you so sure it isn’t magic?” Soph jumped off the dais, stripped off her wet robe, and took a fresh tunic and trousers from one of Hugayr’s students.

  “Because it always works the same way every time. It’s repeatable.” C.L. sounded extremely certain.

  “Isn’t that what a magic spell is?” Soph retorted.

  Anita rolled her eyes.

  Hugayr’s student began piling the remaining cloths into a basket. “Sorry to interrupt, but I should show you to the dormitory.” She glanced at us. “Timeless and priestesses only.”

  “Are you a priestess?” Soph asked.

  “I will be one day. Hugayr is training me.”

  “Well, according to your training, would you say that what we experienced here was magic or science?”

  The student shot a neurotic look over her shoulder at Hugayr. “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘science.’” Soph had used two Nabataean words that translated more literally as “knowledge device.”

  “Do you know the word ‘science’?” C.L. said the word in English.

  The student shrugged and continued in Nabataean. “I haven’t started English yet. But I speak Hebrew and Greek.”

  “What about Plato? Do you know him? We’re talking about his idea of logical deduction.” C.L.’s Nabataean was terrible, but the student understood them.

  “Plato hates women. His work is useless to us.”

  “I don’t mean him. I mean his method.”

  “Talking to other men to discover truth?”

  I snickered. She had a point. C.L. frowned at me.

  Anita broke in and tried to restate the question so it made more sense in Nabataean. “I think Soph was asking whether you think this is a spirit or a mechanical device.” She pointed at the dais.

  “Oh, I see.” The student set down her basket. “We discuss this question often. It is one way to contemplate the three faces of al-Lat, who represents many kinds of power in one woman. She is an engineer, she is a mother, and she divines the answers to cosmic mysteries. So I guess … sometimes she is a mechanical device, and sometimes she is a spirit.”

  “That was very well said, Ahed.” Hugayr had been eavesdropping.

  Ahed bowed her head respectfully and fought to suppress a pleased smile. “Thank you, Priestess.”

  “And thank you, Ahed. I’m ready to see my new home.” Soph scooped up the basket of wet fabric and linked arms with the student. “Should we drop this off at the laundry?”

  “Yes, let’s do that.”

  Hugayr nodded at us. “Well met, travelers. I believe we still have something to discuss.”

  We sat on cushions in her chambers and Anita presented our case. “We think there are men who are trying to destroy the Machines.” She paused, searching Hugayr’s impassive face. “I have heard … you might know something about this.”

  The priestess nodded. She withdrew a multi-tool from her robes and turned it over in her hands, pondering. I wondered if she’d gotten it from someone like Morehshin, fleeing a future of bioengineered patriarchy. At last she spoke, sounding weary. “It’s happened before. We have records of it, from several times.”

  “How did people stop them before? Do you have any advice?”

  Hugayr pocketed the multi-tool again and straightened her shoulders. “Kill them, obviously. Find the men and kill them.”

  A glass shard lodged itself in my gut. “We can’t. Killing might make things worse. There must be some other way.”

  “Don’t
be stupid. There is no other way.” Hugayr was losing patience. “Do you want to imprison us in a history that cannot be changed?”

  “We aren’t murderers.” The words ached in my mouth. I wanted so much for them to be true.

  “Killing for al-Lat is not the same as killing for yourself.”

  I started to say something else, but Anita pinched my arm. “Thank you, Priestess. You’ve given us a lot to think about.”

  As we left through the tunnel, none of us wanted to talk about what Hugayr had said. It was almost a relief when C.L. started griping about our conversation with Ahed after the sacrifice. “I thought al-Lat was some kind of fertility goddess. That’s what Wikipedia said. She’s not an engineer.”

  Anita gave C.L. some side-eye. “I think you’d better quit while you’re ahead. Pretty sure you’re starting to be offensive with all that explaining of things you know nothing about.”

  “Offensive, yes. I think Hugayr would be displeased.” Morehshin took out her multi-tool and shook it like a kid turning a soda bottle into a spray weapon. “Look what she showed me.” Ball lightning cracked five feet ahead of us, and every hair on my body stood on end.

  “What the fuck, Morehshin!”

  “What?” She shrugged. “It’s harmless at that distance.”

  I decided not to say anything about the scorch marks she’d left on the walls.

  * * *

  A representative of the Order accepted Soph’s sacrifice as legitimate, made some marks on a tablet, and gave us the next AGU slot on the Machine. After some debate, we decided to return to 1893 to deal with the Comstockers nonviolently. All of us except Morehshin instinctively recoiled from Hugayr’s advice; there had to be a way to defeat them that didn’t involve death.

  Six slaves pounded with stone and bone on the floor to activate the interface, and two added a quick rhythm with small iron mallets. Morehshin used her multi-tool to send a bright finger of blue plasma into the control panel that hovered overhead.

  Emerging from the wormhole with a jolt, it took a moment for me to realize there had been no unexpected trip to the Ordovician. Morehshin gave a triumphant whoop. “Much easier with those settings! Hugayr is a genius!” My neck ached. The memories of Beth felt closer here, harder to push aside. A muted clang of cable cars came through the windows and into the Machine chamber. The slaves had been replaced by steam-driven tappers, and the bureaucrat with his tablet and clubbed beard had morphed into a tidy row of four wooden tables staffed by people in a range of nineteenth-century fashions, from white robes to tweed suits.

  We returned to our quarters in the scholars’ neighborhood and had a late meal of goat cheese, lemon-scented chickpeas, flatbread, and dates soaked in wine. Then we washed it down with more wine. It started to rain, and someone cursed loudly outside as a cart splashed through manure-laced puddles. It reminded me of Chicago when I’d arrived in early spring.

  “I think we should target the Expo,” I said. “That’s where Elliot and the other saboteurs are. Plus, I think we have a chance to get abortion legalized if we can do another big anti-Comstock protest.”

  Morehshin nodded eagerly. “Comstock must be stopped. His laws are at the root of the divergence. He’s going to inspire similar men in Europe.”

  “I still don’t understand why Comstock is so important to these travelers.” Anita fiddled with a cube of cheese.

  “He’s some kind of inspiration to them—”

  I had more to say, but Morehshin cut me off. “He put men in charge of reproduction. Do you understand? That is too much power for any one group.”

  Her point wasn’t nuanced, but I knew what she was getting at. “Morehshin is right. Comstock is making it illegal for people to have agency over their futures. Over the future of the species, even.” I thought back to Elliot’s pamphlet about how women’s inferiority was simply a matter of evolutionary biology. According to Morehshin’s hints, her present was ruled by people using science to control reproduction in line with the Comstock Laws.

  C.L. sipped wine and shook their head. “None of this will matter if the Comstockers destroy the machine at Raqmu. I think they’re back there in the Ordovician, hacking on it.”

  At that moment a spray of water hit the window, and I felt a burst of excruciating double memories. Beth was dead, her suicide a needle in my gut; and she was alive, saying she never wanted to see me again. Calling me a liar. An unfamiliar feeling of shame burrowed into my chest. Was I really going to organize anti-Comstock protests while the Machines were in danger and the timeline froze?

  I pondered our options. I understood edits and reversions, merging conflicts and orthogonal deletions. But I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around how a Machine shutdown would propagate across the timeline. “Aren’t we technically in a version of the timeline where they failed?” I asked. “I mean, C.L. saw the cuts and the Machine is still working.”

  “It’s a good question, and all I have is a hypothesis right now.” C.L. set down their wineglass. “What I saw is probably part of an extreme kind of merging conflict. My guess is that there are many divergences that split at some point before those cuts were made. We’re in a version where they fail but we’re getting closer and closer to one where they succeed. That’s why we’re seeing those interface bugs with increasing frequency. Essentially, those are signs that we’re living in a timeline where the Machines are being damaged. Soon, we could be in one where the Machines don’t work at all.”

  “How soon?” Anita was troubled.

  “Based on my readings, I’d say six months to a year. There seems to be a regular progression to their edits. But they could accidentally hit the right button tomorrow. I suspect the mechanism is a lot more complicated than that, but you never know.”

  Anita put her chin on her fists. “We have to travel back to the moment right before they make those cuts and stop them. That way we revert back to a timeline where the Machines are undamaged.”

  C.L.’s face was grave. “Are we going to do what Hugayr told us?”

  “No,” I replied firmly. “We can stop them some other way.”

  Morehshin gave me side-eye. “What will we do? Talk them out of it?”

  “I think we can agree that whatever we do, a mission like this could be a one-way trip for some of us,” Anita said. “Or all of us.”

  As her words sank in, I realized this might be our last chance to stop Comstock. “We wouldn’t need more than six months to do our edit here in 1893. Once we’ve done it, we can face whatever meets us in the Ordovician.”

  “None of that will matter if the Comstockers control the Machine.” C.L. was getting angry.

  “It will matter if we don’t make it back from the Ordovician.” Emotion had winnowed my voice down to a whisper. “I want to leave a better timeline behind. Not just an open timeline, but one where people who are not men can control the means of reproduction.”

  Morehshin grabbed my hand inside her fist and I felt a hardness in her palm. “I will go with you. Let us defeat Comstock before dealing with the men who are sabotaging Machines.”

  “It’s risky.” Anita exchanged glances with C.L.

  “All of this is risky. Let’s finish the edit that we began at the Expo.” I was pleading now. “Maybe that will propagate forward and eliminate our Comstockers.”

  “That sounds like a Great Man view of history. Stopping Comstock doesn’t mean you destroy the social movement that made him. We have to tap down to the Ordovician in six months.” Anita sounded doubtful, but I could tell she was coming around.

  C.L. was unconvinced. “I’m going to stay here to keep monitoring the Machine, and if the emissions reach dangerous levels I’m going back there to … to do something.”

  Anita cut them off. “I’ll stay here with you, C.L. If it comes to that, I’ll go with you. Let’s use 1893 as our home time, so neither of us is too far ahead of Tess when we get back to 2022.”

  “Yes. When we get back to 2022,” I affirmed. “That will be a luck
y edit.” As I mouthed the cliché, I realized I’d never thought about its actual meaning. A lucky edit was an event out of our control, the side effect of a fungible timeline, sometimes good and sometimes bad. But of course there was no such thing as luck. There were only deliberate revisions, hard-won changes, and their unintended consequences. A headache worked its way down my neck and beneath my shoulder blades. I needed sleep.

  Everyone agreed it was time to turn in. Morehshin took the bedroom with C.L. and I rolled myself up in a thick rug next to Anita. We had a cubby next to the dining room to ourselves.

  “Anita, I need to tell you something.” I couldn’t keep the anxiety out of my voice.

  She propped herself up on one elbow. “Sounds serious.”

  “You know when I told you guys about seeing that Comstocker back at that concert in 1992? Well … I did something else while I was there.”

  “Did you make an edit?”

  “No. I mean, yes … but that was later. My younger self was at the concert, and I felt fine after seeing her. So … then I snuck back upstream. From Flin Flon once, and then a couple nights ago from ancient Raqmu. I changed something in my past.”

  “Tess.” I could tell she was biting back what she wanted to say.

  “I know. It was stupid. But it seemed … I don’t know. I thought it would be okay. But it wasn’t. And now I feel really, really awful. I’m in a lot of pain.”

  “Oh fuck. You need to tell me everything.”

  I put my head in my hands. For my whole adult life, I’d striven to make significant edits. I’d dreamed of saving Beth. And now I realized that those goals had always been part of the same fantasy. I’d drawn Beth into terrible, fucked-up things when we were young. But there was one time I’d helped her, when she got that abortion. Maybe, all this time, I’d been trying to propagate my gift to Beth across populations and years. If our edit of Comstock took, there would never be another teenage girl driven to desperation by laws that turned her body into a destiny she could not change.