by M. G. Harris
“He’s not Josh. . .” She turns to Andres. His beard is much shorter than I remember my own father’s being. Little more than stubble. Hair’s longer, though; greyer too. Strands of it touch his collar. I try to swallow as she repeats in a conspiratorial whisper, “He’s not Josh.”
Andres Garcia peers at me. “Who are you?”
I breathe out slowly. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Try.”
“But it is Josh!” says the little girl. She’s obviously noticed the friction in the air, won’t come any closer. I guess she’s been trained not to go close enough to catch a stranger’s germs. It strikes me that if I didn’t have the same face as their son, right now there’s a chance I’d be on the ground, shot dead, right next to Tyler.
“What’s your name?” I say to the little girl.
Eleanor and Andres gasp. But they don’t move. The little girl stuffs almost a whole fist in her mouth and runs behind Eleanor, peeking out at me from behind her legs.
Tyler says, “He’s Josh . . . but from a different reality.” When he puts it like that even I can hardly believe it. “He’s got some kind of bracelet on his arm lets him time travel into different realities.”
“What nonsense. . .” Eleanor begins.
Andres interrupts her. “You really don’t know your baby sister, Sofia?”
“My sister. . .?” I have to stop then. I’m closer to tears by the second.
“He’s not Josh,” Tyler insists. “Your son Josh works for them now, for the government. He’s a blue-blood. They changed him.”
Eleanor grows rigid beside Andres. But he says nothing. “Andres. What is he talking about?”
“I think maybe they’d better come inside.”
Tyler’s first movements into the house are cautious, suspicious. Andres takes Tyler’s rifle, promising to return it when he leaves. Inside the cottage there’s a warm, yeasty smell of baking bread. Kind of Blue on the stereo. Apart from an enormous freestanding pine table and some chairs, the only object in the kitchen is an upright piano. As I pass, I notice sheet music open at The Peacocks.
You could easily forget that this is an island of life in the midst of Armageddon.
Tyler asks, “How did you survive the plague?”
Andres answers carefully, “We stayed home. We’d spent most of the year stocking up so that we wouldn’t have to leave the house.”
“Yeah, but . . . people must have come, trying to get your food. How did you keep them away?”
Eleanor and Andres exchange a look and then glance back at Tyler. Immediately, he lowers his eyes. “OK.” Something’s understood between them, but I can’t be sure what. I think back to Tyler’s ominous words about the trail of bodies that might once have led up to their cottage.
From the moment that Tyler sees the food that Eleanor lays out on the table, he goes into a kind of joyful ecstasy. “Oh man,” he groans. “You’ve got actual cheese. Actual bread. . .” He stuffs a chunk of crusty loaf into his mouth and pops a cube of crumbly white cheese in afterwards. His eyes close. “So good. We’re down to tinned food.”
“We have two cows,” Eleanor says, speaking to Tyler while her eyes steal over to watch me looking at Sofia. “A few sheep. And a dog trained to attack anyone who tries to get near them. They give us milk. I learned how to make cheese, butter, yoghurt.”
Sofia passes me her plate of bread. “I want some butter.” Hey eyes are round and curious, watching me as I spread the creamy yellow butter. “Are you my brother?”
The whole room falls silent, waiting for my answer. “No.” Sofia seems confused, disappointed. “I look like him,” I tell her, gently. “And I am called Josh. But I’m from somewhere else. Another place. I have a mummy called Eleanor and a daddy called Andres, too. Just like your brother Josh.”
“And a sister called Sofia?”
“No.” She looks downcast.
I can’t take my eyes off the little girl. Sofia. She’s got to be around three, four years old. That means she was born around the time that in my own reality, my father disappeared. And suddenly it becomes very clear to me. I look at them and try not to notice the ache in their expressions.
“You didn’t go looking for the Ix Codex,” I say to Andres. “Did you? Because of . . . the baby.”
“He . . . he’s right. I was going to an excavation in Cancuen, in Guatemala. I had a lead, some information about the Ix Codex. But then Sofia came along, earlier than we expected. And I didn’t go.”
For a moment, no one speaks. Andres continues to regard me with a mixture of bemusement and disbelief. “But how is it possible that you know about this? I don’t remember telling you, Josh.”
“You didn’t. Where I come from, I found out when you went missing. They told us you’d been murdered, your body put on a plane that crashed, to make it look like an accident.”
“Murdered?!” Andres tries to laugh.
“Sofia’s a nice name for a sister,” I say wistfully, watching the dark-haired little girl wrap her arms tightly around her mother’s thighs, huge brown eyes gazing into mine. This little Sofia saved her father from making the fateful trip to Ek Naab. So he gets to live, in this timeline. But the Ix Codex was never found, and now the whole world is paying.
Eleanor picks up Sofia in her arms, kisses her cheeks and takes her to the living room to watch a DVD. Soon I’m hearing the faint strains of the Dora the Explorer theme music from the television. She comes back into the room, leaving the door to the living room ajar.
One factor changed – the creation of Sofia – and the destiny of the universe is altered.
Every time I think I’ve found the zero moment – the starting point for all the changes in my own history – I find that it goes further back.
Arcadio and his cryptic messages; he quoted a writer named Calvino, warning me against searching for the zero moment. As if to say – don’t try to go backwards to change your own history, because it’s sure to fail.
Well, he was right. I tried to go back in time and change the past so that my father didn’t die. But all I did was to cause an event that led up to his death.
Arcadio wrote the zero moment quote in lots of copies of John Lloyd Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan. He tattooed himself with a page reference to that book – his way of leaving himself a message in case using the Bracelet of Itzamna caused him to lose his memory. I’d always assumed Arcadio wrote them to remind himself who he was, to warn himself about the dangers of travelling in time.
But what if he was also warning someone else – me?
Was Arcadio trying to tell me that some things are set in stone? Or was he telling me that time travel is dangerous; don’t meddle with the past because you can’t predict the consequences?
I haven’t travelled into the past this time, but into the future. Yet it hits me now that if something goes wrong here and I get stuck – then I will change my own timeline too.
At the very least – I will cease to exist in that history.
And Ixchel. Instead of finding me again, seconds after she’s seen me disappear with Madison, she’ll wait and wonder and live a life of what-could-have-been. Thinking about it, my insides feel cold and loose. Ixchel wouldn’t be the first person to lose someone they cared about to time travel.
Susannah St John lost Arcadio.
Simon Madison lost his father, Martineau.
And if anyone cared about Madison – perhaps Ollie – then she’s lost him too. Poor Madison, I almost feel sorry for him now; wandering about in a vacant region of post-apocalyptic Mexico, without food, clean water or fuel. Will he even survive?
Andres is clearly at a loss for words. When he looks up again, I sense that he’s come to a conclusion about me.
“You really are from an alternate reality?”
“I travelled through time, from June 2012,” I say.
“Do you have a spaceship or something?”
“Actually,” I smile, “I kin
d of do. But it doesn’t travel in time. I have to leave it here.”
“If it doesn’t travel in time,” Andres says, “then where did you get it?”
“Someone must have left it for me. . .” Such traces of my invisible co-conspirator make me uneasy. It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing someone other than you staring back. “I’m not the only time traveller,” I admit, with reluctance. “We kind of work together.”
Arcadio. It has to be.
Eleanor says, “What are you doing here?” She still hasn’t smiled, hasn’t softened her expression one tiny bit. She can’t even look at me when I’m looking at her.
“I came to find out what went wrong with a plan to save the world from the 2012 superwave. But I don’t think that plan was ever used in this reality. So now I need to find out how the Sect . . . the Emergency Government . . . took over the world. Then when I go back to my time, maybe I can stop them.”
“You won’t change anything for us, then?”
I can’t read Eleanor, can’t tell whether she thinks that’s a good thing or not.
“Truth is,” Tyler says blandly, “even with all his ‘time travel’ and his spaceship, there’s nothing he can do to help us. We’re stuck with the Emergency Government. So it’s back to prehistoric times for everyone except the chosen few.”
Andres asks, “You mentioned ‘the Sect’ . . . what’s that?”
I tell them all about the Sect of Huracan and their carefully constructed plans to prepare a “new world order” after the collapse of civilization. Over the next hour I end up telling Tyler, Andres and Eleanor all about the Ix Codex and Ek Naab, the ancient Erinsi plan to protect the world from the 2012 superwave. Then we come to the subject of Zsolt Bosch, the twenty-second-century scientist who discovered the Erinsi ruins.
“But if Bosch hadn’t time travelled, that 2012 plan would have worked,” Tyler observes. “So it’s like he caused all the trouble.”
Warily, I agree. I’m beginning to wonder if Bosch wasn’t born into this very timeline. In his world, the Sect of Huracan secretly controlled every major government. I’d say, from what I’ve seen, that they could be on the way to that.
Andres says, “I don’t understand why you started to time travel.”
“Because this other time traveller left me messages, a series of postcards sent to me during December 2010. By a guy called Arcadio.” There’s a pile of Sofia’s drawings and scrap paper at one end of the kitchen table. I take a piece and write out the entire text of Arcadio’s postcard messages to me. “Like this.”
WHAT.KEY.HOLDS.BLOOD.
DEATH.UNDID.HARMONY.
ZOMBIE.DOWNED.WHEN.FLYING.
KINGDOM’S.LOSS.QUESTIONABLE.JUDGEMENT.
FINESSE.REQUIRES.PROPER.HEED.
“He hid the name of the location of where I had to go with an acrostic, you know, where the first letter of each word is a letter in the secret message. Each postcard showed a different Mayan ruin. The secret location was Tlacotalpan.”
Andres smiles. “Ingenious.”
“What are the dots for?” Tyler asks, poring over the words.
“It’s in code. A Caesar cipher.”
Tyler asks, “So who is Arcadio?”
“Great question. But I don’t know the answer.”
Andres says, “It seems certain that your friend Arcadio is a person who enjoys codes.”
“Codes and quotations. He’s cryptic! I’ve found messages from him with bits from a writer called Borges and another called Calvino. And he particularly likes to leave messages in a book by that explorer, John Lloyd Stephens.”
Andres pushes back his chair, dazed. He leaves the room, returns a moment later. In silence, Andres lays four books down on the table. The first two I recognize – both volumes of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan by John Lloyd Stephens. The other two are Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges and If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino.
Transfixed by the sight of all those books together, I glance across at the page where I’ve written the postcard messages from Arcadio.
I steady my nerves with a sip of hot pine needle tea. “Yes – those exact books. In fact – everything you’d need to know to be Arcadio . . . is in this room, right now.”
“That’s well spooky,” comments Tyler.
Andres says, urgently, “Do you know what these are, Josh? They are the only books I managed to bring from home.”
Through lips that feel fuzzy, I murmur, “These books were all in our house. . .?” I guess I’d never paid much attention to my parents’ book collection.
“Yes.”
“Maybe you’re Arcadio,” Tyler says to me. His tone is playful but each word swipes me like a cane. “Maybe you do stay here. You read those books. And then you go into the past and write all those messages.”
Silence falls over the four of us. I’m totally unable to speak, hyper-aware of the breath in my throat and mouth. I want to argue, to protest, the way I always have when Ixchel accused me of being Arcadio, predicting that I would desert her.
Tyler’s suggestion has an unmistakable sting of truth.
Yet I can’t be Arcadio. Don’t want to be. The idea of being trapped here in this nether-future, without Ixchel, growing up amongst the ruins of modern civilization?
It’s everything I’ve been fighting to avoid.
“You could be happy here, with us,” says Andres, gently. “It would make Eleanor and Sofia happy too.”
“I can’t stay here,” I blurt. “I won’t.”
Tyler says, “What if that’s the only way to help people in your own timeline? That girlfriend you talked about, the one you said you were mad for. Or your own mum, and everyone else?”
“No,” I say, desperate. “It can’t be! That’s why I have to go back with something, anything that can help prevent this future from happening.” I stand up. “Tyler, you promised to help. I want to go now. Take me to the EG Centre. Or to the Futurology Institute. I’m pretty sure that’s where the Sect was building its new headquarters.”
“The Futurology Institute is the EG Centre,” says Andres. “They never finished that building; it was commandeered by the Emergency Government.”
The Sect’s fingerprints are all over that.
“And no one thought that was strange? That the Emergency Government would set up in Oxford of all places?”
“Less strange than you might think. Hitler planned to use Oxford as his capital if he conquered England. It’s one of the reasons why Oxford wasn’t bombed.”
I move towards the door, but Eleanor stands in my way.
“No. For God’s sake, child, you may not be my son but there’s no way I’ll stand by and watch you get yourself killed.”
Andres stands up too. He lays a protective hand on my shoulder. “She’s right. We’re not letting you go like this.”
For a moment I’m completely dumbfounded. Montoyo and my mother in my own reality, Andres and Eleanor in this; they all want to stop me doing what I know needs to be done.
“What you need is a plan,” says Tyler. “Lucky for you, I was taught by one of the best – Captain Donnelly was a brilliant strategy man. Reckon you’re a bit short of one here.”
Frustrated, I say, “I need to get into the Sect’s offices, make copies of their computer files. When I get back to my own time, we can analyse their data, work through it backwards and find out what they did to be able to take over. There’ll be a weakness that can be exploited.”
Tyler and Andres laugh. “How they took over?” says Tyler. “I already told you about hip33, didn’t I? That’s how. Without hip33 they couldn’t have made enough people do what they wanted.”
“It was more than that,” says Andres. “A great deal of planning and organization, I suspect. But broadly, yes. Tyler is correct. Without hip33, the Emergency Government could simply not have achieved their aims.”
“Then it’s simple. I get in; I take some vials of hip33 and their d
ata. When I get back to my time, my friends analyse hip33 and make an antidote. That way we’re covered – if we can’t stop the 2012 superwave, we’ll stop the Sect.”
“It’s not ‘you get in’; it’s ‘we’,” Tyler says. “Three of us, Josh. That’s the minimum team you’ll need to pull off a heist like this.”
He looks expectantly at Andres. “So – Dr. Garcia. Are you in?”
By the time we’re close to finishing the plan, night has fallen. Tyler has drawn maps of the EG Centre’s treatment labs, from memories of the months he spent as a ‘blue-blood’ agent. He tucks them carefully into his pocket.
Before they light candles and gas lamps, Andres and Eleanor go through a ritual of pulling down the blackout blinds. It’s protected their secrecy before; it will again. Sofia wants me to read her a bedtime story but Eleanor vetoes the idea. “We don’t want the baby getting confused,” she says firmly.
We decide to leave at dawn. Tyler and I get our heads down for a few hours in the third bedroom: other-Josh’s room. I notice a stack of guitar tabs printed out from the Internet. Posters of Arctic Monkeys, Green Day and Muse on the walls, from when other-Josh used to come here for his holidays. So, we have that in common.
I can’t sleep, so I go down to the kitchen and pick up one of the books – the one by Borges. I find the essay that Arcadio quoted from in his letter to me, the one he left with Susannah St John. The title is “A New Refutation of Time”.
And then I hurl the book across the room. Is this me becoming Arcadio?
A little while later, Tyler shakes me awake. In the candlelight his eyes seem wild, filled with the call of battle. We change into jogging outfits and running shoes – the first part of the plan is to pass ourselves off as a bunch of guys going for a morning run.
As we stand on the threshold of the cottage, Andres kisses Eleanor goodbye, stroking her hair. It seems a bit odd, after months of seeing my own mother with Carlos Montoyo. Maybe I actually miss him.
With some reluctance, Eleanor puts her arms out to me for a hug. Feeding me in her own kitchen may have softened her attitude to me a bit, but she’s still wary. When I’m close she whispers, “Don’t worry now, I’m not confusing you with my boy. But you be good to your own mum, you hear?”
