This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

  The seeker crosses the barren land, the broken city. She gathers splinters from the engines’ wrecks, and as the sun sets, she slides those splinters one by one into her fingers.

  Her mouth opens, but she makes no sound.

  * * *

  My perfect Red,

  How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol horde got bored? Perhaps you’ll tell me once you’re finished with this strand.

  The thought that you could have trapped me (stranded me, perhaps? Oh dear, sorry-not-sorry) is so delicious that I confess myself quite overcome. Do you always play things safe, then? Run the numbers so precisely that you can reject out of hand any scenario that has a projected success rate of less than 80 percent? It grieves me to think you’d make a boring poker player.

  But then I imagine you’d cheat, and that’s a comfort.

  (I’d never want you to let me win. The very idea!)

  I wore goggles, but imagine, please, the widening of my eyes at your sweet interrogation in Strand 8827. Did my bosses send me there! Do I have bosses! A suggestion of corruption in my command chain! A charming concern for my well-being! Are you trying to recruit me, dear Cochineal?

  “And then we’d be at each other’s throats even more.” Oh, petal. You say that like it’s a bad thing.

  It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I. The physics of us. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. My viny-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia. We both know it’s nothing so simple, any more than a letter’s reply is its opposite. But which egg preceded what platypus? The ends don’t always resemble our means.

  But enough philosophy. Let me tell you what you have told me, speaking plain: You could have killed me, but didn’t. You have acted without the knowledge or sanction of your Agency. Your vision of life in Garden is sufficiently full of silly stereotypes to read as a calculated attempt at provoking a stinging, unguarded response (hilarious, given how long it took me to grow these words), but spoken with such keen beauty as to suggest a confession of real, curious ignorance.

  (We do have superb honey: best eaten in a thickness of comb, spread on warm bread with soft cheese, in a cool part of the day. Do your kind eat anymore? Is it all tubes and intravenous nutrition, metabolisms optimised for far-strand food? Do you sleep, Red, or dream?)

  Let me also speak plain, before this tree runs out of years, before the fine fellows under your command make siege weapons of my words: What do you want from this, Red? What are you doing here?

  Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

  Best,

  Blue

  PS. I’m touched by the research effort expended on my behalf. Mrs. Leavitt’s Guide is a good one. Now that you’ve discovered postscripts, I look forward to what you could do with scented inks and seals!

  PPS. There’s no trick here, no thwart. Give my best to this strand’s Genghis. We lay on our backs and watched clouds together when we were young.

  * * *

  Blue sees her chosen name reflected everywhere around her: moon-slicked floes, ocean thick with drift ice, liquid churned to glass. She munches a piece of dry biscuit on deck while the ship’s hands sleep, dusts the crumbs off her mitts, and watches them fall into the white-flecked pitch of the waters.

  The schooner’s name is The Queen of Ferryland, carrying a full complement of hunters eager to stack scalps in the hold, hungry for what fur and flesh and fat will buy them in the off-season. Blue’s interest is partly in oil, but chiefly in the deployment of new steam technologies: There is a staggering of outcomes to achieve, a point off which to tip the industry, a rudder with which to steer these ships between the Scylla of one doom and the Charybdis of another, onto a course that leads to Garden.

  Seven strands tangle on the collapse or survival of this fishery—insignificant to some eyes, everything to others. Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.

  Those days rarely happen while on a mission.

  Who can speak of what Blue thinks on a mission, when missions are often whole lives, when the story spun for her to wield a hunter’s hook is years in the making? So many roles, dresses, parties, trousers, intimacies rolled into grasping a berth and bundling into shapeless clothes to keep Newfoundland’s winter at bay.

  The horizon blinks, and morning yawns above it. Hunters spill over the schooner’s side, Blue among them: They sweep across the ice, tools in hand, laughing, singing, striking skulls and splitting skins.

  Blue has hauled three skins on board when a big, brash beater catches her eye: It raises its head in threat for all of half a second before bolting for the water. Blue is faster. The beater’s skull breaks like an egg beneath her club. She drops into a crouch beside it to inspect the pelt.

  The sight hits her like a hakapik. There, in the ice-rimed fur, mottled and marked as hand-pulped paper, spots and speckles resolve into a word she can read: “Blue.”

  Her hand does not shake as she slices into the skin. Her breath comes even. She’s kept her gloves clean, for the most part, but now she stains them red as a name.

  Buried in the depths of glistening viscera is a dry piece of cod, undigested, scratched and grooved with language. She hardly realises that she’s settled her body onto the ice, cross-legged, comfortable, as if tea, not seal guts, steamed dark and fragrant beside her.

  She’ll keep the pelt. The cod she’ll crush to powder, sprinkle over rancidly buttered biscuit and eat for dinner; the body she’ll dispose of in the usual way.

  When the seeker comes hard and fast on her trail, all that’s left is a smear of dark red on blue snow. On hands and knees, she licks and sucks and chews until all the colour’s gone.

  * * *

  My Dear Mood Indigo,

  I apologize for, well, everything. It’s been a long time from my perspective, and, I’m afraid, yours, since your letter—I had another decade or so with Genghis (who says hi, by the way—he told me the most interesting stories about you, or, I assume it was you), after-action reports following, and after those I had the usual sort of routine rebraiding dance. An assessment wrapped the whole thing up. I passed—as ever. The usual nonsense. I imagine you have something of the same: The Agency squats far downthread, issues agents up; then Commandant doubts the agents who return. Yes, we diverge in our travels; yes, we acquire shades; we round; we behave asocially. Adaption is the price of victory. You might think they would realize that.

  I spent the better part of a year recovering from your so-called sense of humor. Hordes and boards!

  I consulted the literature on scents and wax seals, as you suggested. It’s all a bit counterintuitive, this business of communication through base matter. Closing a letter—a physical object without even a ghost in the cloud, all that data on one frail piece of paper—with an even more malleable substance, bearing, of all things, an ideographic signature! Informing any handler of the message’s sender, her role, perhaps even her purpose! Madness—from an operational-security perspective. But, as the prophets say, there ain’t no mountain high enough—so I’ve essayed the work here. I hope you enjoy your whacked seal. I didn’t supply any extra scent, but the medium has a savor all its own.

  There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.

  I prefer read-receipts, all things considered—the instant handshake of slow telepathy through our wires. But this is a fascinating technology, in its limits.

  You ask if we eat.

  It’s a hard question to answer. There is no mono-we; there are many usses. The usses change and interleave. Have you ever stared into the workings of a watch? I’m talking about a
really, really good watch—if you want to see what I mean, climb downthread to thirty-third-century-CE Ghana. Limited Unlimited in Accra does wonderful pieces with translucent nanoscale gears, no larger than grains of sand, teeth invisibly small, actions and counteractions and complications: They break light like a kaleidoscope. And they keep good time. There’s one of you, but so many of us—pieces layered atop pieces, each with its own traits, desires, purposes. One person may wear different faces in different rooms. Minds swap bodies for sport. Everyone is anything they want. The Agency imposes a modicum of order. So, do we eat?

  I do.

  I don’t need to. We grow in pods, our basic knowledge flashed in cohort by cohort, nutrient balance maintained by the gel bath, and there most of us stay, our minds flitting disembodied through the void from star to star. We live through remotes, explore through drones—the physical world but one of many, and uninteresting by comparison to most. Some do decant and wander, but they can sustain themselves for months on a charge, and there’s always a pod to go back to when you want it.

  All of this refers mostly to civilians, of course. Agents need more independent modes of operation. We are separate from the mass, and we move in our own bodies. It’s easier that way.

  Eating’s gross, isn’t it? In the abstract, I mean. When you’re used to hyperspace recharging stations, to sunlight and cosmic rays, when most of the beauty you’ve known lies in a great machine’s heart, it’s hard to see the appeal of using bones that poke from spit-coated gums to mash things that grew in dirt into a paste that will fit down the wet tube connecting your mouth to the sack of acid under your heart. Takes the new recruits a long time to get used to, once they’re decanted.

  But I enjoy eating these days. More of us do than care to admit it publicly. I revel in it, as one only revels in pursuits one does not need. The runner enjoys running when she need not flee a lion. Sex improves when decoupled—sorry—from animalist procreative desperation (or even from the desperation of not having had sex in a while, as I’ve had cause to note after my recent two decades’ sojourn and attendant dry spell).

  I bite blueberry pancakes drizzled with maple syrup, extra butter—that expanding fluff, the berry’s pop against my teeth, butter’s bloom in my mouth. I explore sweetnesses and textures. I’m never hungry, so I don’t race to the next bite. I eat glass, and as it cuts my gums, I savor minerals, metals, impurities; I see the beach from which some poor bastard skimmed the sand. Small rocks taste of the river, of rubbed fish scale, of glaciers long gone. They crunch, crisp, celery-like. I share the sensation with fellow aficionados; they share theirs with me, though there’s lag, and sensor granularity remains an issue.

  So, a roundabout way of saying: I love to eat.

  Probably too much. I seldom can in public, back at the Agency. Commandant starts asking questions if you do. Jaunts upthread, to places where they eat all the time, feel decadent.

  How about you? I don’t mean, necessarily, how do you eat, though if you want to fill me in, be my guest. (Your descriptions of honey and bread—thank you for that.) I’ve described, a bit, our overlapping models—communities public and private, shared interests, shared senses. What’s it like to be a part of yours? Do you have friends, Blue? And how?

  You asked me to tell truths. I have. What do I want? Understanding. Exchange. Victory. A game—hiding and discovery. You’re a swift opponent, Blue. You play long odds. You run the table. If we’re to be at war, we might as well entertain one another. Why else did you taunt me at the start?

  Yours,

  Red

  PS. Cochineal! I get it now.

  * * *

  Atlantis sinks.

  Serves it right. Red hates the place. For one thing, there are so many Atlantises, always sinking, in so many strands: an island off Greece, a mid-Atlantic continent, an advanced pre-Minoan civilization on Crete, a spaceship floating north of Egypt, on and on. Most strands lack Atlantis altogether, know the place only through dreams and mad poets’ madder whispers.

  Because there are so many, Red cannot fix just one, or fail to. Sometimes it seems strands bud Atlantises to thwart her. They conspire. History makes common cause with the enemy. Thirty, forty times throughout her career she has walked away from some sinking, burning island, thinking, at least that’s over. Thirty, forty times, the call has come: Go back.

  At the foot of the volcano, the dark-skinned Atlanteans seek their ships. A mother carries her screaming son in one arm, clutches her daughter by the hand. Father follows. He bears their household gods. Tears streak the soot on his face. A priestess and a priest remain with their temple. They will be burned. They have lived their lives as sacrifices to—who again? Red has lost track. She feels bad about that.

  They lived their lives as sacrifices.

  Gods and children first, they fill the boats. As the earth shakes and the sky burns, even the bravest and most single-minded leave their work. Notes and sums and new engines remain behind. They take people and art. The math will burn, the engines melt, the arches fall to dust.

  This is not even one of the weirder Atlantises. No crystals here, no flying cars, no perfect governments, no psychic powers. (Those last two things don’t exist, anyway.) And yet: That man built a steam-and-pinwheel engine six centuries earlier than the mean. This woman, through reason and ecstatic meditation, discerned the usefulness of zero to her mathematics. This shepherd built freestanding arches into the walls of his house. Small touches, ideas so fundamental they seem useless. Nobody here knows their worth, yet. But if they do not perish on this island, someone might realize their use a few centuries earlier and change everything.

  So Red tries to give them time.

  Her implants glow bright crimson to vent heat. They sear her flesh. She sweats buckets. Growls. Glowers. She pushes herself, here. Island saving’s not a one-woman job, so she works harder than one woman can.

  She rolls enormous boulders to break the coming lava flows. She plows new fake riverbeds with her hands. With the tools at her disposal she breaks rocks and forms their pieces into other rocks elsewhere. The volcano quakes and splits, vomits rock into the air. A stone pine of soot sprouts from its peak. She sprints uphill, a streak of skin and light.

  The lava shimmers, bubbles, spits. Some lands near her. She steps aside.

  The ash-green sea reflects the roil-black sky. The last cormorants flee, darkness against dark. Red searches for a sign. She is missing something. She does not know what. She ponders skies and oceans for a while, wonders.

  While Red looks away, a gob of lava splashes toward her face. She catches it in her palm without looking. Her skin, if it were the sort of skin the panicked villagers below wear around their meat, should char. It is not, does not.

  Too long watching. She turns back to the caldera, to the welling lava.

  She stops.

  Black and gold vein the rising red. Some suns’ surfaces look like this, when she visits them on shore leave. That’s not what arrests her.

  The shifting colors form words that last mere moments, in handwriting now familiar. As the lava flows, those words change.

  She reads. Her lips frame syllables one by one. She commits the words the fire frames to the old kind of memory. There are cameras in her eyes, which she does not use for this. A recording mechanism clamps around the strand of fiber in her skull which might be mistaken for an optic nerve; she turns it off, which the Agency does not think she can do. The lava overflows its lip. She had meant to break this high promontory on which she stands, to make a sort of spout, spilling molten rock down her predetermined channel. Rather, she stands and watches.

  Below, the village burns. Without her capstone effort at the peak, her dikes and redoubts work less well, but the mathematician still has time to grab her wax tablets at least. The boats leave. They get far enough away to survive the earthquake wave as their homes tumble into the sea.

  Red has not quite failed. She shakes her head and walks away, hoping this is the last Atlantis they
will send her back to save. She remembers.

  The volcano stills. Winds part the clouds, in time, and leave the sky blue.

  The seeker scrambles up the slick and barren hill. Strands of thin, glistening volcanic glass cluster near the cooling lava. In another time and place they will be called Pele’s Hair. The seeker gathers them by hand, like flowers, humming.

  * * *

  My careful Cardinal—

  Let me tell you a secret: I loathe Atlantis. Every last single Atlantis across all strands. It’s a putrid thread. Everything you’ve likely been taught about Garden and my Shift should lead you to believe we treasure it as a bastion of good works, the original Platonic ideal for how a civilisation ought to be: How many bright-eyed adolescents have poured the fervour of their souls into lives imagined there? Magic! Infinite wisdom! Unicorns! The gods themselves made flesh! The work we do to maintain these notions is more subtle than you might think, given the publishing peccadilloes of a dozen twentieth centuries. What a robust priesthood Atlantis must have had to support so many earnest young things pitching their past lives in its temples!

  But what a dreary place. Stagnant, sick as a sucking wound. A successful experiment with disgusting results. The volcano was the best thing to ever happen to it: Now it’s legend, possibility, mystery, a far more generative engine than anything it developed over a few thousand years.

  That’s what we treasure. That’s us, always: the volcano and the wave.

  Thank you for your words on eating. After weeks of ship’s biscuit they were especially welcome. I should tell you, as Mrs. Leavitt would, that it’s customary to send letters that can be opened without ruining the seal, but I appreciate your innovation more than I can say.

  What I can say: It was very cold out on the ice. Your letter warmed me.