Time Travel: Recent Trips

by Paula Guran

  "I've been married twice, love. He's sulking. Sulking this morning and sulking at dinner, making it worse for himself every moment because he can't stay in that room forever, and he knows it. Stupid male pride. Whatever in the world has gone wrong with you two?"

  "I don't know," Gwyneth said.

  Down below, in the darkness beyond the tree-studded escarpment, something roared on the savannah. She wondered what it was—something big, no doubt—but nothing she could shape inside her head. And that was how it was with Peter, too, wasn't it? Something big had happened to them somewhere along the way, but she couldn't put her finger on when, or what.

  She couldn't find the shape of it inside her head.

  "I don't know."

  She swiped at tears with one hand.

  "You must think I'm an idiot."

  "I think you're confused. It's okay to be confused."

  "But there's nothing wrong. There shouldn't be anything wrong. He's a good man, he's kind and he's gentle and he's handsome—anyone could see that he's a good man."

  Angela wrapped an arm around Gwyneth's shoulder and pulled her close.

  "I know. I—"

  "He said—" Gwyneth sobbed discreetly.

  The lovers had departed.

  The barman found something pressing to do at the far end of the bar.

  "He said that what was wrong with us wasn't in the Caymans or in Paris or in the Cretaceous. He said it was inside us."

  "He's probably right about that."

  "I thought that I could save us by coming here. I really did. I risked everything on it, everything we had." She sniffed and met the other woman's gaze. "Somehow I thought that I could save us. I don't know how."

  "Do you love him, Gwyneth?"

  "I don't know. We just drifted away from each other," she said, and that image came to her once again: continental drift: landmasses on the move, so slow you didn't even notice it until an ocean lay between you.

  It would have been easier if one of them had cheated.

  "Shhhh," Angela said.

  Gradually, the sobs subsided.

  The barman brought them another coffee. The night had turned cool, and the moon had just started to slide over the massif to their back, laying down a patchwork of shadows on the ridge below them. Once again, Gwyneth felt that new knowledge take shape inside her: that some things could not be spoken, that truth could equal beauty, that pain was sometimes necessary, and real.

  "Why on earth did you ever come here?" Angela said.

  They caught up with Frank at the party, but soon after, he and Angela departed—another shot at Kronosaurs had been promised for the morning, and Angela had shamed him into going along this time. "We didn't come here to play tennis," she said. "Besides you'll be wearing a lifesuit. It's not like you can drown."

  Afterwards, Gwyneth floated ghost-like through the party, waiting for Peter. She had resolved to kiss him on the stairs when he came, but he did not come, and at last it was late. The moon had risen high into the alien sky. The fires had dwindled to coals. Even the hard-core drinkers were pouring themselves one by one into their rooms.

  Somehow—afterward Gwyneth could never quite figure out precisely how it happened, how the decision came to her or if it had been a decision at all and not some foreordained conclusion—she found herself at the concierge's desk. Inquiries were made. The concierge responded without lifting an eyebrow. Apparently such inquiries were not uncommon.

  The corridor was in the basement of the hotel.

  She knocked on the door.

  Robert Wilson opened it.

  "Are you sure?" he said.

  "I'm sure."

  His hands were callused. They felt real against her flesh.

  Later—it must have been three or after—Gwyneth slipped through the door of her room. Peter stirred in the depths of the eggshell bower.

  "What time is it, Gwen?" he said in the darkness, as though he didn't know, as though his voice wasn't wide awake, and waiting.

  "It's late, Peter."

  He was silent for a long time. Gwyneth stood by the door until her eyes adjusted. She made her way across the shadowy room. She stood by the window, staring out into the Cretaceous night. It had grown darker, but the moon in its long descent still frosted the leaves outside the window. If she squinted, she could see—or imagined that she could see—something moving out there near the forest floor. A low-slung night grazer, maybe, or maybe just the wind-drift fronds of some ground-hugging fern.

  "The party must have gone late."

  "I guess it did."

  "The T-Rex and everything. People must have been excited."

  "It's all anyone could talk about."

  "I'm sorry I was ill. I wish I could have been there."

  She said nothing.

  "What was it like?"

  "The party or the T-Rex?"

  He laughed in the gloom.

  She had no words for it, no way to begin.

  "There was something spiritual to it," she said. "I don't know how to explain."

  Now his laughter had a bitter edge.

  "Spiritual? Seeing one giant animal tear another one to pieces?"

  "It's not that—"

  But it was. The blood sport of the thing had excited her.

  "—or not that alone, anyway. It was the thing's purity of purpose, I think. So devoid of confusion or . . . or ambiguity. Just pure appetite. Every sinew of its body had evolved to serve it."

  She said, "It doesn't make any sense. I know it doesn't make any sense."

  In the silence that followed, she felt once again the distance between them: continental drift, something so big she couldn't quite shape it in her mind.

  "You weren't ill," she said.

  "No."

  "You could have come." Then: "What are we going to do?"

  He was silent for a long time.

  "Was it worth it, Gwyneth?"

  She stared into the moon-silvered dark.

  Peter turned on the bedside lamp.

  Her face hovered in the glass, hollowed out and half transparent, ghost-like.

  "Turn it off. Turn it off, Peter."

  He did, and the Cretaceous dark rose up to envelop her.

  "Another shot at Kronosaurs, tomorrow," he said, and she felt a doorway open between them.

  Some things you could not speak of. Some wounds healed in silence.

  "We should get some sleep," he said.

  Gwyneth stood in the threshold. Her body was wide awake. She felt like she might never sleep again. Peter swept back the veils of the eggshell bower and stood, tall in the darkness, and came to her. He put a hand to the small of her back and leaned over, brushing her ear with his lips.

  "Come to bed, Gwen," he said.

  But she only stood there, his hand at her back, his breath at her ear. The night deepened. Even the moon was gone. Something huge and bright streaked across the sky. It erupted on the horizon, red and orange, a god-light towering into vacuum far above. Shockwaves followed, flattening the trees on the distant ridges in a broad expanding circle, as though a great fist had slammed down upon the planet, rocking them so that they had to clutch at one another to stay on their feet. The thick glass spider-webbed in its frame. Somewhere in the depths of the hotel, something crashed. Someone screamed. Then the fire, burning from horizon to horizon as it ate the dark. Some things could not be saved, Gwyneth thought. Some wounds did not heal. Then the yoke took her. It was just as Wilson had said: it was like being turned inside out.

  BLUE INK

  Yoon Ha Lee

  It's harder than you thought, walking from the battle at the end of time and down a street that reeks of entropy and fire and spilled lives. Your eyes aren't dry. Neither is the alien sky. Your shoulders ache and your stomach hurts. Blue woman, blue woman, the chant runs through your head as you limp toward a portal's bright mouth. You're leaving, but you intend to return. You have allies yet.

  Blue stands for many things at the end of time: for the f
orgotten, blazing blue stars of aeons past; the antithesis of redshift; the color of uncut veins beneath your skin.

  This story is written in blue ink, although you do not know that yet.

  Blue is more than a fortunate accident. Jenny Chang usually writes in black ink or pencil. She's been snowed in at her mom's house since yesterday and is dawdling over physics homework. Now she's out of lead. The only working pen in the house is blue.

  "We'll go shopping the instant the roads are clear," her mom says.

  Jenny mumbles something about how she hates homework over winter break. Actually, she isn't displeased. There's something neatly alien about all those equations copied out in blue ink, problems and their page numbers. It's as if blue equations come from a different universe than the ones printed in the textbook.

  While her mom sprawls on the couch watching TV, Jenny pads upstairs to the guestroom and curls up in bed next to the window. Fingers of frost cover the glass. With her index finger, Jenny writes a list of numbers: pi, H0 for Hubble's constant, her dad's cellphone number, her school's zip code. Then she wipes the window clear of mist, and shivers. Everything outside is almost blue-rimmed in the twilight.

  Jenny resumes her homework, biting her nails between copying out answers to two significant figures and doodling spaceships in the margins. There's a draft from the window, but that's all right. Winter's child that she is—February 16, to be exact—Jenny thinks better with a breath of cold.

  Except, for a moment, the draft is hot like a foretaste of hell. Jenny stops still. All the frost has melted and is running in rivulets down the glass. And there's a face at the window.

  The sensible thing to do would be to scream. But the face is familiar, the way equations in blue are familiar. It could be Jenny's own, five ragged years in the future. The woman's eyes are dark and bleak, asking for help without expecting it.

  "Hold on," Jenny says. She goes to the closet to grab her coat. From downstairs, she hears her mom laughing at some TV witticism.

  Then Jenny opens the window, and the world falls out. This doesn't surprise her as much as it should. The wind shrieks and the cold hits her like a fist. It's too bad she didn't put on her scarf and gloves while she was at it.

  The woman offers a hand. She isn't wearing gloves. Nor is she shivering. Maybe extremes of temperature don't mean the same thing in blue universes. Maybe it's normal to have blue-tinted lips, there. Jenny doesn't even wear make-up.

  The woman's touch warms Jenny, as though they've stepped into a bubble of purloined heat. Above them, stars shine in constellations that Jenny recognizes from the ceiling of her father's house, the ones Mom and Dad helped her put up when she was in third grade. Constellations with names like Fire Truck and Ladybug Come Home, constellations that you won't find in any astronomer's catalogue.

  Jenny looks at her double and raises an eyebrow, because any words she could think of would emerge frozen, like the world around them. She wonders where that hell-wind came from and if it has a name.

  "The end of the world is coming," the blue woman says. Each syllable is crisp and certain.

  I don't believe in the end of the world, Jenny wants to say, except she's read her physics textbook. She's read the sidebar about things like the sun swelling into a red giant and the universe's heat-death. She looks up again, and maybe she's imagining it, but these stars are all the wrong colors, and they're either too bright or not bright enough. Instead, Jenny asks, "Are my mom and dad going to be okay?"

  "As okay as anyone else," the blue woman says.

  "What can I do?" She can no more doubt the blue woman than she can doubt the shape of the sun.

  This earns her a moment's smile. "There's a fight," the blue woman says, "and everyone fell. Everyone fell." She says it the second time as though things might change, as though there's a magic charm for reversing the course of events. "I'm the only one left, because I can walk through possibilities. Now there's you."

  They set off together. A touch at her elbow tells Jenny to turn left. There's a bright flash at the corner of her eyes. Between one blink and the next, they're standing in a devastated city, crisscrossed by skewed bridges made of something brighter than steel, more brilliant than glass.

  "Where are we?" Jenny asks.

  "We're at humanity's last outpost," the blue woman says. "Tell me what you see."

  "Rats with red eyes and metal hands," Jenny says just as one pauses to stare at her. It stands up on its hind feet and makes a circle-sign at her with one of its hands, as if it's telling her things will be all right. Then it scurries into the darkness. "Buildings that go so high up I can't see their tops, and bridges between them. Flying cars." They come in every color, these faraway cars, every color but blue. Jenny begins to stammer under the weight of detail: "Skeletons wrapped in silver wires"—out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees one twitch, and decides she'd rather not know—"and glowing red clocks on the walls that say it's midnight even though there's light in the sky, and silhouettes far away, like people except their joints are all wrong."

  And the smells, too, mostly smoke and ozone, as though everything has been burned away by fire and lightning, leaving behind the ghost-essence of a city, nothing solid.

  "What you see isn't actually there," the blue woman says. She taps Jenny's shoulder again.

  They resume walking. The only reason Jenny doesn't halt dead in her tracks is that she's afraid that the street will crumble into pebbles, the pebbles into dust, and leave her falling through eternity the moment she stops.

  The blue woman smiles a little. "Not like that. Things are very different at the end of time. Your mind is seeing a translation of everything into more familiar terms."

  "What are we doing here?" Jenny asks. "I—I don't know how to fight. If it's that kind of battle." She draws mini-comics in the margins of her notes sometimes, when the teachers think she's paying attention. Sometimes, in the comics, she wields two mismatched swords, and sometimes a gun; sometimes she has taloned wings, and sometimes she rides in a starship sized perfectly for one. She fights storm-dragons and equations turned into sideways alien creatures. (If pressed, she will admit the influence of Calvin and Hobbes.) But unless she's supposed to brain someone with the flute she didn't think to bring (she plays in the school band), she's not going to be any use in a fight, at least not the kind of fight that happens at the end of time. Jenny's mom made her take a self-defense class two years ago, before the divorce, and mostly what Jenny remembers is the floppy-haired instructor saying, If someone pulls a gun on you and asks for your wallet, give him your wallet. You are not an action hero.

  The blue woman says, "I know. I wanted a veteran of the final battles"— she says it without disapproval—"but they all died, too."

  This time Jenny does stop. "You brought them here to die."

  The woman lifts her chin. "I wouldn't have done that. I showed them the final battle, the very last one, and they chose to fight. We're going there now, so you can decide."

  Jenny read the stories where you travel back in time and shoot someone's grandfather or step on some protozoan, and the act unravels the present stitch by stitch until all that's left is a skein of history gone wrong. "Is that such a good idea?" she asks.

  "They won't see us. We won't be able to affect anything."

  "I don't even have a weapon," Jenny says, thinking of the girl in the minicomics with her two swords, her gun. Jenny is tolerably good at arm-wrestling her girl friends at high school, but she doesn't think that's going to help.

  The woman says, "That can be changed."

  Not fixed, as though Jenny were something wrong, but changed. The word choice is what makes her decide to keep going. "Let's go to the battle," Jenny says.

  The light in the sky changes as they walk, as though all of winter were compressed into a single day of silver and gray and scudding darkness. Once or twice, Jenny could almost swear that she sees a flying car change shape, growing wings like that of a delta kite and swooping out
of sight. There's soot in the air, subtle and unpleasant, and Jenny wishes for sunglasses, even though it's not all that bright, any sort of protection. Lightning runs along the streets like a living thing, writing jagged blue-white equations. It keeps its distance, however.

  "It's just curious," the blue woman says when Jenny asks about it. She doesn't elaborate.

  The first sign of the battle, although Jenny doesn't realize it for a while, is the rain. "Is the rain real?" Jenny says, wondering what future oddity would translate into inclement weather.

  "Everything's an expression of some reality."

  That probably means no. Especially since the rain is touching everything in the world except them.

  The second sign is all the corpses, and this she does recognize. The stench hits her first. It's not the smell of meat, or formaldehyde from 9th grade biology (she knows a fresh corpse shouldn't smell like formaldehyde, but that's the association her brain makes), but asphalt and rust and fire. She would have expected to hear something first, like the deafening chatter of guns. Maybe fights in the future are silent.

  Then she sees the fallen. Bone-deep, she knows which are ours and which are theirs. Ours are the rats with the clever metal hands, their fingers twisted beyond salvage; the sleek bicycles (bicycles!) with broken spokes, reflectors flashing crazily in the lightning; the men and women in coats the color of winter rain, red washing away from their wounds. The blue woman's breath hitches as though she's seeing this for the first time, as though each body belongs to an old friend. Jenny can't take in all the raw death. The rats grieve her the most, maybe because one of them greeted her in this place of unrelenting strangeness.

  Theirs are all manner of things, including steel serpents, their scales etched with letters from an alphabet of despair; stilt-legged robots with guns for arms; more men and women, in uniforms of all stripes, for at the evening of the world there will be people fighting for entropy as well as against it. Some of them are still standing, and written in their faces—even the ones who don't have faces—is their triumph.

  Jenny looks at the blue woman. The blue woman continues walking, so Jenny keeps pace with her. They stop before one of the fallen, a dark-skinned man. Jenny swallows and eyes one of the serpents, which is swaying next to her, but it takes no notice of her.