This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

Your talk of ideographic signatures and operational security brought to mind some grooming work I did among a few strands’ worth of Bess of Hardwick’s botanists. While there it was my pleasure to observe correspondence between them and their Lady; just how layered and complex plain speech could be, how many secrets wrapped in the banner of Sincerity (a word commonly invented in sixteenth centuries). Even that ideographic signature could easily be a lie, of course: counterfeit stamps, sealed letters hidden under separate cover, the wrong colour of wax or silk flossing. How much glorious double-talk took place while Mary, Queen of Scots, was under her roof! I assure you that cryptography pales in comparison; imagine a cipher made up of interlocking moods shifting in response to environmental stimuli.

  Also, standardized spelling wasn’t yet a feature of English. Forging someone’s handwriting was wasted effort if you didn’t also learn their idiosyncratic orthography. Funnily enough, that would prove to be the undoing of latter-century forgers. Chatterton, that Marvellous Boy, et cetera.

  We make so much of lettercraft literal, don’t we? Whacked seals aside. Letters as time travel, time-travelling letters. Hidden meanings.

  I wonder what you see me saying here.

  Absent from your mention of food—so sweet, so savoury—was any mention of hunger. You spoke of the lack of need, yes—no lion in pursuit, no “animalist procreative desperation,” and these lead to enjoyment, certainly. But hunger is a many-splendoured thing; it needn’t be conceived only in limbic terms, in biology. Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out?

  Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.

  I hope it isn’t too hard to read this. Best I could do on short notice—hope it reaches you before the island breaks around you.

  Write to me in London next.

  Blue

  * * *

  London Next—the same day, month, year, but one strand over—is the kind of London other Londons dream: sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story requires it, all meat pies and monarchy—this is a place Blue loves, and hates herself for loving.

  She sits in a Mayfair teahouse, in a corner, back to the wall with one eye on the door—some spycraft rules transcend both time and space—and the other on a stylised map of the New World. She finds it slightly incongruous—the teahouse favours a decidedly Orientalist aesthetic—but eclecticism is one of the many things Blue cherishes about the fibres of this particular strand.

  Her hair now is black and thick and long, deftly styled into a high chignon girdled in braids, carefully twisted curls clustering at her nape, drawing attention to the length and slope of her neck. Her dress is modest and neat, not quite at the cutting edge of fashion; it’s been a couple of years since the Princess line was new, but she suits it in charcoal grey. She is not here to play a role; she is here to be invisible.

  She has observed, with pleasure, the very fine china of which the establishment boasts: Meissen’s Ming Dragon, sinuous as arteries, persimmon bright against gilt-edged bone white. She looks forward to her own pot, anticipates the dark, smoky, malty path her chosen tea will pick between the notes of candied rose, delicate bergamot, champagne and muscat and violet.

  Her server arrives, quietly, unobtrusively laying out the Meissen tiered cake tray, teapot, sugar bowl. As she settles the teacup on its saucer, however, Blue’s hand snaps out to circle her retreating wrist. The server looks terrified.

  “This set,” says Blue, adjusting, softening her eyes into kindness, her grip into a caress, “is mismatched.”

  “I’m so sorry, miss,” says the server, biting her lip. “I’d already made the pot, but the cup was cracked, and I thought you’d not want to wait longer for your tea, and all the other sets were spoken for on account of it’s a busy time of day, but if you’re happy to wait I could—”

  “No,” she says, and her smile is like clouds parting; the withdrawal of her hand into her lap is an erasure, a thing the server imagined, surely, this woman is a perfect picture of a lady, “it’s very beautiful. Thank you.”

  The server ducks her head and retreats back into the kitchen. Blue stares intently at the teacup, its saucer and spoon: Blue Italian, classical figures harvesting grain, carrying water forever beneath the rim.

  She pours her tea, delicately, without straining the leaves. She lifts her teaspoon to the light—can see that it’s coated with a downthread substance she thinks she recognises but sniffs to be sure. She wills herself not to look around, commands every atom of her body into stillness, forbids the need to leap into the kitchen and pursue and hunt and catch—

  Instead, she stirs the spoon, empty, into the tea, and watches as the leaves unclump, swirl, spindle into letters. Each rotation is slow, and she marks paragraph breaks with small sips; every sip undoes the letters until she swirls them into meaning again.

  Briefly she wonders if the hardness in her throat is poison, her inability to swallow around it anaphylactic. This does not frighten her.

  She closes her eyes against the alternative, which does.

  When the tea and letter are finished, clumps remain; she reads the dregs as a postscript. Easy enough to do when the New World map matches it so precisely; easy to read the discrepancy as direction.

  She dabs at her mouth, lifts the teacup, places it upside down beneath the boot of her heel, and grinds it so hard and swift that its destruction makes no sound.

  After she’s gone, the seeker, dressed as help, armed with dustpan and brush, collects the remnants, gathers them like rosebuds. When she is out of sight, she cuts the mix of clay and bone and leaf into three tidy lines, tightly rolls up a bank note, and inhales sharply enough to feel smoke behind her eyes.

  * * *

  Dearest 0000FF,

  Common cause on Atlantis—who would have thought? I suppose no thread’s one thing; they train us full confident in that knowledge. Each has facets, hooks, barbs, useful in different ways, depending on articulation. The novice believes a single change will make a thread thus, or thus. An event—an invasion or a spasm or a sigh—is like a hammer: one side blunt and perfect for driving nails, the other clawed to pry them free. And, like hammers, you store Atlantises out of sight when not in use: stick ’em in a drawer somewhere safe till the next need comes around.

  I wonder, in that light, how much of your work has helped me, and the other way round—a question beyond my calculative capacity. I’d ask the Chaos Oracle, but I have enough trouble with the higher-ups at present. I had to step fast after your last letter caught me napping. Commandant wanted explanations, as Commandant tends to, after the sinking island took so many treasures with it. A brief lapse in efficiency, according to the Agency’s models, but well within tolerance considering my track record. But added to the inroads your side’s made against our more exposed deep-cover teams—well, I shouldn’t talk shop. What a bore, your tea salon pals would say.

  I summarize: It’s been too long since my last letter.

  Strand 233’s Atlantis was not the most offensive of the brood, and I spent little enough time there. Joke as I might, I see the value. Humans need marks to strive for—but imperfect systems decay. So we build them ideals. Change agents climb upthread, find helpful strands, preserve what matters, and let what doesn’t fall to dust: mulch for the more perfect future’s seed.

  Mrs. Leavitt suggests relying on metaphors one’s correspondent—that’s you, I think?—will find meaningful. I confess I don’t entirely know what’s meaningful to you. I fall back on assumptions: seeds and grass, growing things. It verges on stereotype. And when you write me, you write in furnace and in flame.

  You ask about hunger.

  Y
ou ask, in particular, about my hunger.

  The short answer: no.

  The longer answer: I don’t think so?

  We sate needs before they strike. In this body, an organ (a designed, implanted, rigorously tested organ) seated somewhere above my stomach registers the moment my metabolism requires fuel and stops the lizard-brained old subsystems that would make me keen and irritable and blunt my thoughts—all those tricks Dame Evolution plays to make us hunters, killers, seekers and finders and gorgers. I can disable the organ when I must, but it’s so much more stable to receive a status report than to feel weak.

  But the hunger you describe—that blade jutting from the skin, the weathering as of a hillside often struck by storm, the hollowness—it sounds beautiful and familiar.

  When I was a girl, I loved reading. An archaic pastime, I know; the index and download are faster, more efficient, offering superior retention and acquisition of knowledge. But I read, antique volumes handed down and fresh-replicated books: How strange to uncover things in sequence! And so I read a comic book once, about Socrates. In the comic book, he was a soldier—he was, that part’s true, I asked him—and one night, as his fellows lay down to sleep, he started thinking. He stood, immobile, lost in thought, until the dawn—at which instant he found the answer to his question.

  It all seemed very romantic to me at the time. So I left my pod and wandered upthread and far away, far from the chatter and the mutual observation. I found a hilltop on a small world, breathable but barren, and I stood there like Socrates in the comic book, lost in thought, weight on one foot, and I did not move.

  The sun set. The stars rose. (They are a rose, right? Or something? Dante said that.) I realized that as my ears grew used to the silence, I could still hear the others: Our chatter swarmed the heavens; our voices echoed from the stars. This was not how Socrates stood, or Li Bai or Qu Yuan either. My isolation, my experiment, had caused a small sensation among those who cared for me, and for whom I cared, and that sensation spread. Lenses and eyes turned upon me.

  I was, I think, thirteen.

  I received suggestions: philosophy textbooks, meditation guides, offers of practice and alliance. They crowded round. Whispers in my ears: Are you okay? Do you need help? You can talk to us. You always can.

  There were tears. Other organs bind that process too, weeping—they keep our eyes clear and minds sharp, but chemistry is chemistry; cortisol, cortisol.

  It feels harder to write than it should. It feels easier to write than it should, as well. I’m contradicting myself. The geometers would be ashamed.

  I sent them away.

  Each being’s entitled to her privacy, so I refused to let them see me. I was the only person on that tiny rock, and I made the world go dark.

  Wind blows. High places grow cold at night. Sharp rocks hurt my feet. For the first time in thirteen years I was alone. I, whatever I was, whatever I am, tumbled first up, into the stars, then down to the broken land. I dug into the soil. Night birds called; something like a wolf, but solitary and larger, with six legs and double-banked eyes, padded past.

  The tears dried.

  And I felt lonely. I missed those voices. I missed the minds behind them. I wanted to be seen. That need dug into the heart of me. It felt good. I’m not certain how to compare this to something you would know, but, imagine a person melded to a Thing, an artificial god the size of mountains, built for making war in the far corners of the cosmos. Imagine that great weight of metal all around her, pressing her down, giving her strength, its hoses melding with her flesh. Imagine she shears the hoses off, steps out: frail, sapped, weak, free.

  I was light, hollowed, hungry. The sun rose. I found no revelation. I’m not Socrates. (I know Socrates, I served with Socrates, and you, senator . . . But I digress.) But I walked on, from that place to another, and from that to another in turn, until, years later, I came home.

  And when Commandant found me, slid inside me, said, there’s work for those like you, I wondered if all Agents were like me. They weren’t—I found that later. But we’re all deviant in our different ways.

  Is that hunger? I don’t know.

  No friends, though? Blue! That’s not at all what I would have thought. I don’t know—I suppose we see you all curling around campfires singing old struggle songs.

  Have you been lonely?

  I hope the tea’s well. Good? Well. I’ll look for you next in a more public forum.

  Yours,

  Red

  PS. I hesitate to write this, but—I’ve noticed my letters run long. If you’d rather I grow more concise, I can. I don’t want to presume.

  PPS. Apologies for the imprecision of my salutation—I think salutation’s what Mrs. Leavitt calls that? I forgot what name the Strand 8 C19 Londoners gave that shade of blue on imported porcelain. Would have used it if I remembered.

  PPPS. We’re still going to win.

  * * *

  As the prophet says: Everybody’s building them big ships and boats.

  The emperor reigns uphill, flanked by his mummified co-rulers’ temples, each served by their own high priest. Stone steps and highways link peak to peak along the ridge. Great cities grow and glow. Downslope spread the farms, and beneath those, against the shoreline, unprecedented as pomegranates in local logic, a seaport.

  Coastline trade occurs, of course, and reed boats ply the highland lakes. Quechua sailors and fisherman know the shapes of the wind, can sail through any storm, rate themselves equal to any wave. The western ocean’s horizon has always seemed a wall to them: Beyond this rests the world’s end. But a genius who has spent his life counting the paths of stars and collecting bits of storm-cast wood and weed upon the beach has a theory that another land waits across the water. Another genius, a decade older than the first, has discovered a method for knotting reeds far stronger and more durable than any her mothers made; with it, a team under her direction could build a boat large enough to carry a village.

  What good is a land across the water, young men asked the first genius, when we have no way to get there? As soon grasp for the moon.

  What good for coastal fishing, young men asked the second, is a boat that can carry a village?

  Fortunately, geniuses understand that young men are often fools.

  So they sought the wisest being they knew: Each, separately, climbed the many thousand steps to the mountain peak, and on audience day they knelt before the current emperor’s great-grandfather, mummified upon his throne, gold- and jewel-bedecked, radiant with age and command, and offered their gifts to him. And the secret priests who wait behind the emperor’s thrones are not young, nor are they all men, and they can frame two points into a line.

  So the great-grand-emperor’s word goes out, and so a port is built, and sailors flock, beckoned by adventure. (Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.) They will sail together, to a new world. They will sail, together, to a land of monsters and miracles. Currents will bear their massive fish-tailed ships across, freighted with silver and tapestries, with knot work and destiny.

  Red knots reeds with fingers callused as wood. She was one of the second genius’s earliest students, she nudged her to seek the great-grand-emperor’s aid and held her elbow as they climbed. She is no warrior here, no general; she is a woman taller than usual, who emerged from the woods one day naked and alone and was sheltered. She knots and weaves well, because she has learned. When she has finished this ship, the production model, large enough to hold two villages at least—then it will sail, and she will sail with it, because someone needs to tend the knots if they break.

  She plays a tenuous game, this strand. As she knots and thinks to herself, she decides she would describe it using terms from Go: You place each stone expecting it may do many things. A strike is also a block is also a different strike. A confession is also a dare is also a compulsion.

  Will the people of Tawantinsuyu brave the ocean their murderers will one day cal
l the Pacific, and, finding the swift currents, travel to the Philippines, or even farther, as others have traveled before? Will they, crossing waters so unfished that all a woman need do to eat is dart her hand beneath the waves and pull the fish up wriggling and silver, find new civilizations and make conquest, or common cause? Will this alliance and trade, stretched across the Pacific, save Tawantinsuyu when Pizarro’s grotesque sails belly up from the south? Will, at the least, early contact with Eurasian plagues strengthen these people against them?

  Or: Will the tradesmen make it so far as a China ruled by the Ming, soon to reel from an enormous currency crisis that will bring the empire to its knees—a currency crisis brought on by the shifting exchange rate between copper cash and silver, of which the people of Tawantinsuyu sport an ample supply? Stabilized, will the Ming duck the four-century cycle of empires’ rise and fall, and endure, growing, transforming, expanding to keep pace with the West’s slow Enlightenment and its overweening Industrial Revolution?

  Perhaps. Small likelihood—but we must seize each chance. The Agency is not happy. Other agents have been caught or killed, cleansed from the weave or marooned in strands of which it’s better not to think. Not Red. Not yet. But she must work faster.

  Red’s hands slip on the knot. She is not thinking to herself. She is explaining. And to whom is she explaining? Well.

  She looks out to the meeting of sky and sea.

  Stands up.

  Walks away.

  She feels observed. Might Commandant be watching her? And if so, for what? She has been so careful. She does not even think the sky’s name, often.

  An old man catches her pacing on the beach and offers cloth for the sails: sample after sample. She flips through them: too weak, too weak, too weak, too rough, and this one—what even is it? Bunched and uneven, more crochet than weaving.

  “This one,” she says.

  As the sun falls west, she perches on a rock and rolls the language of the knots between her oak-hard fingers. She feels each letter and word and wonders how long the sky and sea spent winding this cord, and who taught her the knot code in the first place, whether the iris bit her lip in frustration as she worked through a difficult passage.