by Cat Rambo
One reason he’s stuck is that he hasn’t brought along any mechanism for a return trip, as none had yet been invented in those centuries ahead of him, because traveling forward through time, except at the speed of life, was far more hypothetical than traveling in reverse.
But another reason is—he’d assumed, no, he’d hoped, that once he had done what was necessary for his present (our tomorrow) to have the future he and his collaborators wished to create—there’d be nothing of the familiar left for him to return to. So what would be the point of machinery designed to bring him back?
Then, too, there is the fact that though the date of his arrival in the past is tragically closer to his own time than to the intended target from which he’s fallen short (maybe the scientists had a theory which would have helped them understand the why of that, but not him, no—he was no scientist), it is not so close ahead that he can live the intervening years to see his time once more through normal means, using that aforementioned form of time travel which is the only one available to us all. He is already too old for that, and things . . . things have gone far too wrong.
Even though people live a long time where he comes from in what’s our future, and in what is now miraculously his own, far longer than people manage to last during the time in which he has become stuck . . . that lifetime cannot possibly be long enough. If he were to linger for another century, to breach the perilous decades about which he knows too much, until he reaches the one of his birth, that persistence will still not be enough for him to reenter the precise time stream he remembers.
The time stream he’s left behind.
The time stream he has lost.
Just as well. Those scientists who’d sent him forth, who knew far more about these things than the ones such as him who were chosen to be travelers and create the change the future desires, theorized that such an anomaly of coexistence could be disastrous. (Oh, they had lots of theories, didn’t they? One reason he’d welcomed being sent back was because he’d no longer be forced to listen to them. He’d tired of their complexities. Their inconsistencies.)
But he’d have been willing to risk it, that overlap with his future self, for a taste of his own time—surely that coexistence would have been no more of a disaster than what he now faces.
His team’s one shot at undoing the damage of our time—for firing him back had taken all the future had, and there was unlikely to be another attempt for years, if at all—has gone awry, not just by days, but by decades. May of 1927, instead of surrounding him, is long behind him now, in this time’s shared past, and the rally at which he was supposed to materialize on a certain day, a certain moment, is unreachable. The arrest he was supposed to witness went unwitnessed; the one he was supposed to have voluntarily endured had been given no chance to occur.
He has no purpose now, and his only destiny is to be tortured by time.
What was it he’d always heard about those not learning from history being doomed to repeat it? Well, he had learned that history—memorized its musty details until it seemed personal, seemed lived—like all those who’d hoped their secretive project would help them avoid it, redirect it—and what good has it done him? He is about to repeat history anyway. There is nothing he can do with his learning, his tools, to thwart that.
The past he’d been sent to alter is already past. The crisis point on which his whole mission hinged can no longer be changed, for the one whose birth he’d been sent to prevent had already been born.
He’d had a very specific plan, one which he’d rehearsed endless times in the unreachable future, so often that he’d even, at times, found himself rehearsing it in dreams.
One punch to get him hauled off with the rest of the crowd, one touch as he sat in the cell beside his target, one simple transfer of genetic material which had been placed within his palm to travel back with him . . . and the man with whom he was supposed to have been scooped up and taken to jail would be forever sterile. He’d have no son, create no future (well, past turned future for our traveler) president, and the world would be saved.
But now it is too late, the son already born, the course already plotted, the destruction already unavoidable. What’s done was done, so now there is nothing left for him but to walk the treacherous path beside those he’d been sent to save, watch as the tenor of the world grows uglier, wince at the news reports he’d thought he could help erase, weep for what he could have undone, but now has no chance of undoing.
Success, he knows, could have meant he would have been erased, too, or so went another of the theories spoken to him in urgent tones by those he’d left behind. And yet . . . he does not care. Forced to live a life he’d had no idea he’d be expected to live, understanding that he’d see the things he values begin to vanish from this world, this time, this past, he knows . . . that’s a kind of erasure, too. And a much more painful one than the theories anticipated, for it’s one he must endure day after day for the rest of his life, as opposed to winking out of existence as a new future was born, which would have happened (or so he’d been told) without him even realizing.
That would have been preferable, he thinks.
He has not been erased, though, and to survive, he works menial jobs, ones for which he needs no identification. He could become rich, he imagines, with what he knows. Football scores. Horse races. Election results, especially the one he was taught to believe was surprising, the one he’d failed to undo. Only—what would be the point? It would change nothing.
He can’t, no matter how much wealth he might amass, get back further in time to do what he’d been sent to do. And whether he is rich or whether he is poor, it will not be that many more years (compared to the number of years he traveled to get here) before the color of his skin and his perceived ethnicity would lead him along with millions of others into internment camps, camps which would not have come to be had he not failed to hit his mark.
After a time, trapped as he is, he grows lonely—how could he not, with all he’s left behind?—and so he allows himself to have a life of sorts. It is not one he would have chosen. But it is one to which he surrenders. If he is going to be forced to endure these times, he is not going to do it alone.
He will have a wife, but no, not a family, not a child, for he will not cause to be given to anyone a future which is no future at all. That would be more selfish than he is willing to admit himself to be. But a wife . . . though it is not fair to her, he would go mad without one, he knows that, even though it is a wife to whom he can not speak the truth, not explain that the reason for their childlessness is because he’d applied what he’d brought from the future to himself, not feel able, in fact, to explain any part of the future to her at all . . . but still. A broken life is better than no life at all.
He stops reading newspapers or watching the news on TV. What would be the point? He’d read it all, seen it all, back (forward, actually) when he’d readied himself for what was to come. Everyone in his future knew the point at which everything had started to go wrong. Everyone thought nothing could be done about it. Everyone except those who’d banded together in secret to send him back in time.
Everyone he’d disappointed.
That disappointment, his own and the future’s, fills him with despair, and at times the weight of it makes him think he should end it all, and die before he is born. He buys a gun, and contemplates doing to himself what the time stream had not. As weeks pass and he moves closer to taking that action, the thought occurs to him that he could instead turn that weapon on the one who would change the world for the worse, the one who should not have been born, erasing him in a different way than he’d originally planned.
But he cannot bring himself to consider that path further. He is not a violent man. Before his trip had begun, he had made his peace with his part in the undoing, but to kill, even though refraining from killing meant killing the future, was beyond him.
And s
o he circles back around to his original plan, and even begins a note to his wife, apologizing for what he had done, would do, but while in the midst of the drafting of it is moved to set it aside and instead write a note of a very different kind.
He decides to send a message to the future in which he will explain everything that has happened, everything that has gone wrong, and then he will bury it where he hopes it will be found. Maybe it will be useful to them. Maybe . . . maybe it already has been useful to them. That his notes had not been discovered before he’d been sent back did not mean his work has been a futile message, one destroyed by the passage of time without being received. It can, he hopes, still yet be found in the future.
His future.
The real future.
That’s another of the theories of which he’d had too much.
There is no hurry. He takes his time choosing his words, and etches them carefully onto metal plates. There are many years between now and then, after all.
The day before he intends to head out to the desert, a desert near where the laboratory that launched him will eventually grow, his wife finds that message. He has grown careless, leaving the compartment beneath their bed unlocked. Or perhaps he has unconsciously decided—he’s come to love her enough that he wants her to see him as he really is.
He looks at her, the woman who will die long before he is born, this ghost whom he loves, he really does, and listens to her questions, uncertain how to answer them.
Is he writing science fiction? Is he losing his mind? Is he merely trying to distract himself from a world growing harsher? (She is able to ask the last because she has been paying far too much attention to a presidential campaign he has been doing his best to ignore. He has to, for he feels that what is happening is too much his fault, even though it is not.)
He looks at her in silence for a while, and then yes, he tells her. And yes. And yes.
He comforts her until she sleeps, and then he goes into the desert and buries what he has written, encased in lead, weighted down by concrete, deep under the sand where he knows the construction of a new building had been about to begin when he’d left.
Will anyone find it? Will anyone read it? Will anyone believe it, use what he had written down to try again, try better? It doesn’t matter. It is a cry for help that had to be written. He may never know the effect his words will have, and so the writing of them has to be enough.
And then, after having done the one small thing he can, he goes home to his wife and tells her he will write no more. There will be no more distractions. He will ignore the future, ignore the past, pay attention only to the now, and to her.
Eventually, of course, she dies. He’s known that would happen, for even in the past, his life, remember, still ran as long as lives had evolved to be in the future. He feels bad about that most of the time, the losing of her. But sometimes he feels as if it is something he’s read in a history book.
When they come for him in the years after her death, after the election of the man who should never have been elected, he is prepared, because he knew it would happen if he failed to erase what he had been sent back to erase, if he did not use the touch of his hand, the finger on a trigger. The words preceded the deed, a net of future past in which he is swept up. He’d made sure, before they took him to the camp, that there would be nothing that mattered to him left behind in the small apartment empty now even of her. Which was exactly how he’d had to deal with his leaving of the future.
As he moves through the camp, he once again does his best, encased behind barbed wire, to make a life of sorts for himself among people who’d died before he was born. But he cannot seem to reach them. All those with him move through the place stunned to be there, and he cannot breach their shock. Yet—how they can be so surprised, how they can not have seen this coming, he is unable to understand. A person didn’t have to be from the future and already know this past had occurred to know. After the election that was, this was inevitable.
This and something else.
When the war begins, as surely it must, not at all the war the people who’ve put him and the people like him away had lived in fear of, things fall apart quickly. Some of the guards, before they abandon their posts, want to kill them all, but others cut through the fence, taking pity on him, and on themselves, and let them run free to make it on their own. As if there is anywhere to run.
He wonders, as he wrestles his way to a mountaintop from which he can see the bombs begin to fall, whether his message has gotten through, whether a second time traveler might still do what he, himself, has failed to do, and if so, whether he’d even know. He imagines he’d wink out of existence without feeling it if another had managed to make it back to succeed where he has not, just as he would have vanished by his own hand had he succeeded. But then he recalls there were other theories recited by the scientists, more comforting theories . . .
The timelines, they posited, might simply split at the change point, each to proceed along its own path, the stranded time traveler continuing to live in a world unchanged, while alongside him the world he’d left behind would be rescued. Yes, it would be a rescue he’d never get to experience, a rescue he’d never even know to a certainty had occurred, but a rescue nonetheless.
And as the light from the mushroom cloud blinds him, he remembers that theory, and the promise of that other world, the world in which the things he’d been sent to undo had been undone, and in the space before he burns out of existence, he has just enough time to embrace the concept of an undoing he’ll never know, and how that possibility is good enough for him.
It will have to be.
About the Author
Scott Edelman has published more than 90 short stories in magazines such as Analog, PostScripts, The Twilight Zone, and Dark Discoveries, and in anthologies such as Why New Yorkers Smoke, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three, Crossroads: Southern Tales of the Fantastic, Once Upon a Galaxy, Moon Shots, Mars Probes, and Forbidden Planets.
A collection of his horror fiction, These Words Are Haunted, came out in hardcover from Wildside Books in 2001, and was re-released in paperback in 2015 by Fantastic Books. His most recent collection, Tell Me Like You Done Before (and Other Stories Written on the Shoulders of Giants) was published in late 2018.
He has been a Bram Stoker Award finalist eight times, in the categories of Short Story and Long Fiction, a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Memorial Award, a Lambda Award Nominee, and has also been a four-time Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor.
Editor’s Note
Scott’s story came in through the regular submission process, meaning it was read anonymously and a nice surprise when I found out the author. Scott’s prose is graceful and quiet, creating a cerebral, contemplative story that I felt balanced out some of the more action-driven ones like “Welcome to Gray” and “One Shot” in a nice way that helped give the collection added interest in pacing and texture.
The time traveler is moving into the future in the slowest way possible, moment by moment, and there’s some sense of that in the story’s pacing; echoing that stranded, semi-static state. And that moment of intense thought that takes place in this extended meditation on the ethics of time travel and how far one might go to save the future certainly makes one think about what one’s present-day responsibilities are.
Good Pupils
Jack Lothian
On Monday, David’s desk is still empty. We’ve gone through the same process that we go through every day: lining up, trudging through the metal detectors, bags on the conveyor belt, random searches that never feel that random. Picked up our collars from the tray at the end, putting them on, snapping round the back. Filed down the corridors, sticking to the assigned lanes. Through another set of metal detectors into the room, and then to the desk, and the whole time I didn’t want to look to my right, didn’t want to see his seat, as if by not looking
, it’ll somehow break the jinx. David will be slouched there, scowling, like it was a normal Monday.
But the seat is empty, because of what happened last week.
David and I grew up on the same street before his father lost his job and they had to relocate to cheaper housing. Around about that time, my parents became less keen on me spending time over there, but I ignored them. I’d been best friends with David since we were six, almost ten years now. I couldn’t care less where he lived. A lot of people liked to gossip, said we must be doing it, must be boyfriend and girlfriend, but it’s never been like that. It’s something better if that makes sense. Like you’ve got an ally in this world, someone who has your back, no matter what.
Here’s our big guilty pleasure—old teen movies. We’ve got memory sticks full of them; Breakfast Club, Ridgemont High, Heathers, Grease, Pretty In Pink . . . I get they’re corny, and the clothes are weird and the music bad, but they’ve got a strange energy and spirit. When Bender tells Mr. Vernon to ‘eat his shorts,’—it’s amazing—to see someone talk to a teacher like that, and not end up on their knees as a result, drooling and disoriented.
“These are not good pupils,” said David, laughing.
The problem with David is that he’s not really a good pupil either. He’s a smart ass, likes to talk back, and even when he’s not speaking he’s got an array of tuts and snorts he can deploy to signify displeasure at whoever is talking. When we started in Mr. Garvey’s class, it was clear that David’s prime motivation was to test the limits of our new teacher, day by day, lesson by lesson.
He’s also smart though, in a way I don’t think I could ever be. He looks at equations or math problems, and something in that brain of his just clicks, and he’s already solved it on some instinctive level before he’s even aware of it.
So when they introduced the collars, I could see his eyes light up.
