by Edward Aubry
“Athena,” she said quietly.
Helen took Athena’s hand. Very softly, she asked, “What’s your full name, honey?”
Despite Helen’s non-threatening tone, I had never seen Athena quite so intimidated. For a moment, I thought she might cry.
Finally, she said, “Athena Walden.”
Helen turned to me. “We have a daughter.”
And then, looking at them side by side, like an optical illusion that suddenly rights itself, I saw it. Athena did not look like Helen, at least not in a way that anyone who knew them both would mistake one for the other, but there were clear similarities. And in every way that she did not look like Helen, she looked like me.
“We have a daughter,” repeated Helen, “and you never told me.” I was utterly dumbstruck. The thought that this woman—my friend, ally and mentor—was my own offspring was beyond my ability to integrate into my world. So many questions. And worst of all the feeling of complete incompetence in my perception, that I would miss something for years that Helen was able to detect in moments.
“Mom,” said Athena. Hearing that word come out of her mouth wrapped a blanket around my heart.
“We were done with secrets,” said Helen, walking right up to my face. There was no anger in her voice, but the pain was palpable. “Remember? Everything on the table? How long did you keep this from me?”
“Mom!” said Athena. Helen whirled at the sharp tone. “He didn’t know.”
Helen snapped out of the hurt shock she was sinking into and walked back to Athena. She held her fingers up to Athena’s face, gently stroking her cheeks, then threw her arms around her. Athena hugged back, burying her face in her mother’s shoulder. When they finally broke away from each other, Helen’s face was covered in tears.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Look at you. You are so beautiful.” Athena smiled, moved in a way I had never seen in her eyes before.
Helen wiped her eyes with the heels of her palms, and said to me with a grin, “We have a daughter!” Then she ran to me and held me tightly. “We have a daughter,” she whispered in my ear.
“I see that,” I whispered back. What else could I say?
Helen kissed me on the cheek, and let go. She took Athena’s hand, and sat her down on the couch.
“What can you tell me?” she asked.
“Not much,” said Athena.
Helen shook her head. “Keep your future secrets. I want to know about you.”
As I made the adjustment in my heart from Athena my friend to Athena my daughter, I watched her mother try to get to know all the things I had learned about this girl over seven years of my life and thirty-five years of hers. As joyous as this was for all three of us, it meant something that Athena surely knew, and Helen would realize soon enough. Athena and I were both assailed with unhappenings on a fairly regular basis. And she was my daughter. I was never going to return home, and Helen was going to become mother to a family in which she was the only person with an apparently constant life. Which meant she would spend every day wondering if it would be the last day she would ever see us.
If I didn’t find a way to stabilize the unhappening effect, the woman I loved was already doomed to a life of the very worst kind of terror.
elen and Athena talked for four hours. Mostly, I kept out of their hair. I made dinner, occasionally interjected something clever, but otherwise simply basked in this mother and child preunion, and felt my love for both of them swell with every laugh. Once over the hurdle of the shocking discovery, it was a surprisingly simple matter to adopt Athena into my heart as my little girl. I reflected back on my relationship with her as Penelope, and the sibling-like quality it had (although it was never clear whether she was playing the role of little sister or big sister), and it all fell into place. It would take some getting used to, but it would be worth the transition. It did make me miss my own family, and consider how or if I would ever return to them, but I pushed that aside for the time being. It saddened me that Athena would never meet my parents until I remembered she already had.
Before she finally did depart, Athena agreed to pose for a family portrait. It manifested as three twenty-somethings smiling nervously, perhaps the best of friends, perhaps siblings or cousins. Only we would ever know it was two proud parents and their baby girl.
“You,” said Helen once we were alone, “are the best father ever.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Are you kidding me? She’s amazing!”
“Maybe that’s you,” I said.
“She has your sensibilities,” she said. “When she speaks, I can hear you in her voice. She also has a little of your darkness.”
That brought me up short.
“My darkness? I don’t want her to have my darkness.” In fact, Athena’s darkness had come to be her most familiar aspect to me. The thought that I had done that to her was a punch in the gut.
Helen took my hand.
“It makes her strong,” she said. Then she let go and started spinning, and doing a little happy dance. “We have a daughter!” she sang. “And she’s brilliant!” Then she stopped, and the look of joy and wonder on her face became something serious and contemplative. She came to me and held me. I could feel her sighing against my chest. When she looked up, I thought she was going to kiss me, but she just brushed my lips with her fingertip.
“I have to know this is real,” she said. “I have to know it won’t all vanish if we push it too hard. Can you promise me that?”
“Not yet,” I said honestly.
She smiled at me, then took my own finger and kissed it. “Well, get on that.”
elen began visiting me at home at the end of her workdays. Most evenings we stayed in. We alternated cooking dinner. Helen often brought work home, and it was fairly usual for her to work there while I read. In the winter, we did that in front of my fireplace, which for me was still a novelty. As it got warmer, we migrated to the screened-in porch.
Some evenings we went out. Took in a movie. Went to the symphony. Dinner at a fancy restaurant, occasionally even an extravagant one. The stipend I received for the work I was doing for my older self was absurdly grand, and I had also begun to experiment with ways to supplement that. The tricks a time traveler has at his disposal for accumulating wealth are so copious and so obvious that it required very little effort to be sure we would always be able to afford whatever entertainment struck our fancy.
We maintained two residences, but more and more hers became an abandoned shell. She kept most of her work clothes in my closet, and rarely went home unless she needed to get something. I programmed the locks on my house and car to recognize her key card, and she voice-printed on my home computer.
And every night, by agreement, until we could be sure, we kissed, and retired to our separate bedrooms.
On the whole, those three months were some of the most relaxing, carefree and rewarding times in either of our lives. It would prove to be our final calm as the storm began to brew.
thena came to see me one day in my basement lab. I was still working patiently on the unanswered question of stabilizing the unhappening effect.
“You don’t write, you don’t call,” I said as soon as she blipped in. “Your mother and I have been worried sick.”
“You know why Mom is funnier than you?” she asked.
“Why?”
“Her jokes sound much less rehearsed.” She picked up a wrist module, turned it over in her hands, and put it back down.
“She is disappointed, by the way,” I said. “She thought you would start visiting us now. She says she understands why you don’t, but I know it makes her a little sad. She loves you to pieces.”
Athena smiled at that. “Good.”
“So. Athena. For real.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m a little surprised you guessed that, to be honest. And your reason threw me. Mom always said I sprang fully armored from your head, like it was part of a very important story. I always assumed sh
e had given me that name when I was a baby. Turns out you beat her to it. Nice to know you can surprise me once in a while.”
“You could have told me, you know.”
“Ha!” she said. “There were times I almost did, just to see your reaction. There were also times I was sure you had figured it out. But it was always better for you not to know.”
“Is that why you haven’t been back? Because I know now?”
She shrugged. “I’ve been busy.”
“Said the time traveler.”
“Okay,” she admitted. “I wanted to give you two some time to get used to the idea. It’s only been a couple days for me since I saw you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thank you, I guess. Are you staying for dinner? Helen is going to pitch a fit if she misses seeing you.”
“It’s best if she doesn’t see me today.”
“Oh.” I sat. “You’re here on business then?”
She nodded.
“You’re going to tell me about Carlton, aren’t you?”
Athena sat as well. “Yeah, that’s what I’m here to do. There are things you need to know. And before you ask, yes, there are still things I can’t tell you, and yes, there are still things I don’t know. A lot more of the latter than the former, believe it or not.”
I braced myself to hear about Helen’s ex-lover, and the monster he apparently would become.
“Okay,” I said.
Athena cleared her throat. Shifted in her seat.
“Carlton West, even as we speak, is already one of the wealthiest people in his generation. His family controls or has interest in more businesses than any one of them is even fully aware of. His second cousin is a United States Senator, and his Aunt is the Governor of Rhode Island. This is all background. The Carlton currently residing in 2146 has no interest in politics, and fleeing family expectations in that regard is one of the reasons he moved to France.”
“But he becomes something later. Something powerful, right?”
“Can I get something to drink?” she asked. “My mouth has gone a bit dry.”
“Of course,” I said, hopping up. This was going to be big for her. We had already started down this road three times, and each time she had been reluctant—or forbidden—to give me details. My concern over the consequences of the story she was about to tell me now paled beside my concern for the well being of my child. “Water? Lemonade? Scotch?”
“A glass of water would be wonderful,” she said. “If you could leave the bottle of scotch on the table, that would probably be a good idea too.” I served her a glass of ice water with a slice of lemon from the refrigerator in my basement workshop. As instructed, a half-full bottle of scotch was also placed within reach.
She downed half the water in one long draw. Catching her breath, she continued.
“By 2148, that situation had changed. Carlton West had begun to dip his toe into French politics. As an American, his legal ability to influence French policy was limited, at least at first. In 2151, France suffered a major financial crisis. Her attempt to rejoin the European Union was declined by majority vote of the member states. In the wake of this crisis, the government began a slide into chaos that lasted a decade. There were power struggles, bloodless coups…” She took another sip of water. “And one coup that was not so bloodless. Long serving members of the French government were systematically swept aside, and new faces, including outsiders like Carlton West, seized the new opportunities for power. In 2162, France formed an alliance treaty with seven nations outside the EU, five of them on the Arabian Peninsula. Purges followed. There was a war.”
She stopped. All of this was history to her, and near future to me, at least from my vantage point in my own future. From 2092—home—this was all a long way off. But Athena grew up in that world. I wondered how much of her childhood it tainted. I hoped Helen and I were able to shield her from the worst of it.
“At its peak, l’Empire de la France Nouvelle covers seventy percent of the European mainland, and ten percent of Africa, as well as parts of the Middle East. As of 2175, eight hundred and twenty million people have died, either as casualties of ongoing wars, victims of purges, or sufferers of starvation and disease as entire societies have collapsed. And in 2175, l’Empereur de la France Nouvelle is Carlton West.”
“Dear God,” I whispered. Images of mass suffering paraded across my eyes, and towering over all of them, the cruel, stark silhouette of a simple baby stroller, and loving parents with no idea what they had brought into the world. “Is that the timeline you are trying to unhappen? Or fix? Is that your assignment?” Again I pictured the baby. With creeping horror, I pictured my own baby standing over him, with a knife, or a garrote.
She shook her head.
“That timeline is the unhappening. In the original, unaltered timeline, France was provisionally re-admitted to the EU, and recovered in disgrace, but in peace. The motion, which carried by a margin of exactly one vote, succeeded in part because of the influence of Sylvia West, a high ranking diplomat, and Carlton’s first cousin. By all accounts, in the original timeline, Carlton West was a powerful and eccentric businessman, whose oddities and occasional ambitions were tempered by his wife, a woman of ordinary breeding, and extraordinary character.” She downed the rest of her water, then poured two fingers of scotch over the remaining ice and lemon slice.
The possibility that I would black out from sheer guilt overload seemed very real at that moment.
“I did this,” I said. “I made all of that happen.”
“You did nothing of the sort. You met a magnificent woman, and you fell in love with her. More to the point, she fell in love with you. What happened after that was not in your control.” She swirled the scotch in her glass, and took a swig. “None of this is exactly what I came to tell you.”
“There’s more?” I cried. “Somehow there’s more?”
“You may want your own glass of scotch for this.”
I took my swig directly from the bottle.
“Fair enough,” she said. “Carlton West is a time traveler. He has access to the technology, although we do not yet know how he accomplished that. There is no evidence that anyone outside the Time Travel Project has successfully developed it independently. Fortunately for everyone in the world, with one exception, he has not used the technology as a combat weapon. We have even determined that absolutely no one other than he has used it. And so far, in twenty years of travel, he has only ever used it for a single purpose.”
I stared at my daughter, and found my own darkness reflected in her eyes. Helen was right. It did make her strong. “To torment me.”
“To torment you.” She took another swig. “This is what I do now, nearly every day of my life. We find an instance where Carlton has tweaked your history, and I go counter-tweak it. I work for an organization whose entire reason for existing is to right the wrongs done to you by this one person.”
“Thank you,” I said humbly.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “And I love you, and I would do this for you no matter how many people were willing to help me, so I’m just as grateful that organization exists as you are.”
“Are there other travelers? How many people do what you do?”
She looked away, sipped her whiskey.
“Including the undergrad version of you? Two.”
“What? Why?”
“Because becoming a traveler means living the rest of your life in purgatory. You and I see the world in ways no one else ever can, and it’s a curse. You know it’s a curse. No one is ever recruited to do this. There were two others before me. One died. One deserted. We never replaced them. I am on my own.”
I had no words of comfort for my daughter. Anything I could tell her she would have already known years before I ever had the chance to say it.
“Why you? Is it because you’re my daughter? Did I do this to you?”
“I did it to myself,” she said. “When I was fifteen, I stole a wrist module, because I wan
ted to meet… I wanted to see what you were like when you were younger. I became the girl you called Penelope. When the Project finally caught up with me, I was already a traveler. It was too late to save me, so they gave me an implant and a mission, and used what I had become to do good. It’s the same reason I recruited you to help me, when I needed an extra pair of hands. You were already in purgatory. You had nothing to lose.”
We sat in silence for a moment, as I took as much of this in, as well as I could.
“Why don’t you stop him? Right now, while he’s still powerless? Why waste your time on my problems?”
She tossed down the rest of her scotch, and poured two more fingers.
“First of all, he has never been powerless, so that’s not really an option. But the real reason is that after years of these missions, we are still trying to figure out how to fix timelines. In over 500 jumps, my success rate is less than thirty percent. Time is complicated, Dad. That thing I asked you about killing the dog? That’s the easiest decision in the world compared to the calls the Project has to make every single day.” She took another sip of her scotch. “I tried seventy-five times to save Carrie Wolfe. All I ever did was push back the date she died.” She wiped away a tear. “There are just too many variables. Too many ways to fuck up.”
“What if I break it off with Helen right now? Tell her to go back to Carlton?” Just the idea made me dizzy.
“Very noble,” said Athena, “but I’m pretty sure that window closed the moment she laid eyes on you. Like I said, it doesn’t work that way. It’s never that easy.”
Simultaneously horrified and relieved, another awful twist occurred to me.
“If we did ever correct the timeline, make him never become Emperor, if Helen and I never met,” I said, “what would happen to you?”
“To me?” she said. “I would survive. Multiple frames of reference again. Only the fact of me would be erased. The person would remain. After a fashion.”
“After a fashion?”
She shrugged, but offered no explanation.
