Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  That memory was my test of whether our manipulations to the timeline worked. No matter what we did, within the strict rules of the Historical Compliance Committee, my memory was never altered. The bees died, the ecosystem collapsed, and there were no raspberries and almonds to make cookies for my son.

  Our petition to perform Category 2 actions was denied. Non-essential plants weren’t important enough to offset the risk of major changes to the timeline. We had tried to save the honeybees, and we had failed. Others had tried to save the whales, or the butterflies, or the temperate rainforests. They too had failed. We would never fix the past. We would have to find another way.

  My son came to visit on my sixty-fifth birthday, with his wife and their three kids. The kitchen smelled of almond cookies, baking in my oven, each one pressed with my thumb and filled with raspberry jam. The ingredients for the cookies were stolen from the past, raided from a San Francisco condo that would be destroyed an hour later in an earthquake. No one would miss jam and almonds amidst the rubble.

  “Mom,” my son said sternly, “Did you have approval to get this stuff?”

  “I was on an approved plant recovery mission.” Technically I was only approved for the potted blueberry bush on the balcony, but our HCC rep was known to look the other way in exchange for a good bottle of cabernet. Before my son could ask any more questions, I added, “besides, we have something very important to celebrate today. We got approval to bring animals forward. I will finally have my bees.”

  He smiled. “That’s great, Mom. You’ve been working towards that for decades, and I’m glad you get to see it happen.”

  I snorted. “I’m sixty-five, not ninety. Stop making it sound like I could die at any minute. I’m not going to see it happen, I’m going to make it happen.”

  Our discussion distracted me from the cookies, and I pulled them out of the oven a couple minutes late. The grandkids liked them, but they were dry and crunchy, and my son refused to eat them because I hadn’t gotten permission for the almonds and the jam.

  Stolen cookies didn’t count.

  A honeybee fluttered its wings for the last time.

  We never solved the problems of the past, but age and the passage of time have stolen the once-clear image. What remained was the memory of a memory. Vein-crossed wings that were an amalgam of my memory with the countless pictures I’ve looked at since. Soft fuzz the color of ducklings, but was the color in my mind the same color that I saw?

  I traveled to the summer of 1993, to an abandoned field overgrown with grass and barley and wildflowers. I spotted a honeybee on a blue cornflower blossom, and had the foolish urge to try and catch it. That was how we’d collected plants—thousands of plants, but only a few from any given place and time. Bees were not like plants. We couldn’t take a random sample of bees and hope to make a hive.

  At the edge of the field were stacks of rainbow-colored wooden boxes. Hives. I unloaded my pack, lit my smoker, and pulled five empty frames from my collection box. When everything was ready, I flooded the hive with smoke. I took three brood frames, their wax cells filled with eggs and larva tended by nurse bees. I took two frames of honey, too, so the hive wouldn’t starve when I brought it forward. I replaced all five frames with empty ones, and reassembled the hive.

  I brought my stolen bees to the lab and set the collection box at the edge of our reconstructed garden. For a moment, nothing stirred. I worried that bringing the bees forward in time had damaged them. A single bee emerged from the corner of my collection box. Dazed from the smoke, the bee crawled across the surface of the box, from one corner to the other. Then, in a future built from stolen pieces of the past, a wondrous thing happened.

  A honeybee fluttered its wings.

  ELIZABETH’S PIRATE ARMY

  A kraken came to Edgewood Street on the first day of summer vacation. It was a land kraken, with tentacles of fur and spiny branches of coral growing on its head. Elizabeth hadn’t seen it, but she’d heard about it from Sandy, who had heard about it from Laura, who had spotted the beast while playing at O’Malley Park.

  “Come on, Puff,” Elizabeth called. Jimmy was training a pirate army to fight the kraken, and Elizabeth wanted to join. She brought her dog Hufflepuff with her, in case she ran into the kraken on her way to Jimmy’s back yard.

  The army wasn’t very impressive—half a dozen neighborhood boys all running around aimlessly and swiping at each other with sticks. Elizabeth knew all kinds of magic that would help them be a better army.

  She swaggered up to Jimmy, who was shouting orders. “I hear there’s a kraken in the neighborhood.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jimmy reassured her. “My pirates will keep you safe.”

  Elizabeth almost explained that she was here to join the army. Then she looked at the boys, running around with their sticks, and decided she wasn’t interested after all. She would start her own army.

  Pirates needed swords, and Elizabeth knew just the right magic for that. She collected all the butter knives from the kitchen and stabbed them into the dirt around the maple tree in her yard. Her mother made her bring the knives back in at lunchtime, but the magic had worked by then and the tree had grown some lovely sword-branches. Butter knives weren’t very sharp, so the swords were blunt practice swords, but her mother wouldn’t let her have the steak knives, so Elizabeth decided that practice swords would have to do.

  She grabbed a bunch of swords and wandered around the neighborhood, looking for pirates for her army. Her first recruit was Laura, the only kid who’d actually seen the kraken. She took Laura’s little brother too. Jimmy had turned him away for being too small, but he could hold a sword, and he followed most any order Laura gave him.

  They got Kira, and Sandy, and even Jared, who had deserted from Jimmy’s army because they made fun of his glasses. Elizabeth brought them back to her yard and they spent the afternoon practicing with their swords and hunting for bottle caps and buttons and other pirate booty.

  They needed something to guard their treasure, and Elizabeth knew just the spell for that. She made Hufflepuff sit with his front paws touching the treasure, and flicked a cigarette lighter that Kira had taken from the junk drawer in her dad’s kitchen. On her third try, Elizabeth got the spark to make a flame, and Hufflepuff was transformed.

  “He’s kind of a small dragon,” Sandy said.

  “And he keeps barking,” Jared added.

  “Conjuring dragons is harder than making swords,” Elizabeth replied, scratching Puff behind the ears, “and I’m sure he will be very fierce in battle, even if he’s small.”

  They trained until it got dark, and they were a good army. In the morning, they would battle the kraken.

  Elizabeth met her army at O’Malley Park. They found kraken tracks in the gravel behind the swings, and followed them to the jogging path that wound around in the woods. Elizabeth heard yelling, and a couple boys from Jimmy’s army ran past, fleeing from the kraken.

  “Hold together,” Elizabeth told her army. Her pirates held their swords high and stayed behind her. Puff ran circles around the group, yipping in a decidedly undragonlike fashion.

  The kraken had Jimmy cornered, his retreat blocked by the fence that surrounded the park. Up close, the monster looked less like a kraken and more like an elk—with sharp antlers and loose tendrils of partially-shed fur—but it was still a formidable foe for her army.

  Yelling her best battle cry, Elizabeth charged, followed by Puff and five screaming pirates, all waving swords. The beast turned toward them, startled, then leapt over the fence and out of sight.

  Jimmy, clearly embarrassed to have needed help, swaggered up to Elizabeth and said, “You trained some pretty good pirates. You could join my army, if you want.”

  Elizabeth snorted. “Now that we’ve driven off the kraken, there’s no need for pirate armies.” A shadow engulfed them as a huge monster flew overhead. Elizabeth knew just the kind of army to fight this new beast.

  “Tomorrow I’ll be
training ninjas,” she told Jimmy, “and you can help us fight Mothra, if you want.”

  Part 3:

  ALIEN WORLDS

  MOTHER SHIP

  My mother was a colony ship. For one revolution of the galaxy, a quarter of a billion years, she carried her creators between the stars. At the end of that time, all the creators had died. My mother drifted aimlessly through space. After a hundred million years of traveling alone and empty, her drifting brought her to Earth.

  My father was a team of several hundred humans who worked together to make a starseed. Humans are less advanced than the creators were, and prone to tinkering. My mother held all the information they needed to make a perfect seed, but they did not want a clone. They wanted a ship that was uniquely suited to themselves. My father-team was worried that the altered seed wouldn’t take, so they implanted seven, even though ships are meant to carry only one. My mother died giving birth. All my siblings died but me.

  I am carrying thousands of colonists to a planet they have named Last Hope. This is my third trip, each time to a different colony. Humans are all I’ve ever known, and I love them, even though they killed my mother. Their tiny bodies ease my loneliness as I travel. I keep my tendrils wrapped around them to hold them in stasis. They do not feel the intimacy of the embrace, as I do. For them, the journey passes in a brief moment of sleep.

  Ships need no sleep. I wonder what it must be like for humans, to close their eyes in one place and wake in another. Life is in the traveling, in the going. My life is continuous, with time marked only by the shifting of the stars. Their lives are interrupted, not only by their long sleep as we travel, but by smaller sleeps in their normal existence. I spend several centuries pondering such an existence. I would not choose sleep over consciousness, but what if the choice was between sleep and death?

  I could live as they do, I think, if it was my only way to live.

  Seven hundred fifty-eight of the colonists are pregnant.

  I feel a special bond with these women, for I am pregnant too. The descendants of my father gave me only one starseed, not seven. Even so, it was a foolish thing to do. I am deformed. My mother was sleek and streamlined, but I am a jumbled mess of tissue, pocketed with stasis chambers that are arranged not in ordered rows but haphazard clusters. My shell is riddled with holes, and there is metal grafted to my body to compensate for what is missing. How could the humans possibly believe that I would produce a healthy child? My baby’s body is hopelessly misshapen. Only her mind is intact. His mind, I correct myself. We ships have always been female, but my child will be a boy.

  Most of the pregnant colonists carry deformed babies. Humans are simpler creatures than ships, and as we travel, I repair the unborn children. Cleft palate, Down syndrome, conjoined twins—it pleases me to fix such maladies. My ability to heal is what drove these women to go to the colonies. Their lives will be hard, but their children will be whole. I cure unborn children with spina bifida, cerebral palsy, fetal alcohol syndrome. The stars drift slowly by as I continue on to our destination. I heal the adult colonists too, as best I can, for their bodies are not so pliable as the babies. Heart defects and cancers, schizophrenia and depression.

  I wish there was a ship to carry me, a ship that could fix my own deformities and make me as sleek as my mother was. A being so advanced that it could repair my unborn child. I would sleep a billion years in such a ship, and miss the journey of my own life—but there is no healing ship for me. My hope rests in the humans, inferior though they may be.

  *

  One pregnant woman has a baby who is more deformed than all of the others. Hopelessly deformed. She was sobbing when she came aboard, and when I wrapped my tendrils around her, she whispered, as the women sometimes do, “Please, ship, save my baby.”

  Her unborn boy has anencephaly, a neural tube defect where the brain stem forms but the cerebral cortex does not. The boy would never gain consciousness, not with so much neural tissue missing. Her child would not even sleep, he could not claim even the gaps that punctuate a human’s tiny life.

  The boy is a body without a mind. If I heal him, can I claim his mind? The humans are my cargo, and I would never harm them. But I wouldn’t be taking a life, not even a mind. I would only be stealing a body.

  My baby needs a body.

  I wait for several thousand years, undecided. My poor deformed baby, cradled in the tendrils of my womb, grows weaker. I show her the patterns of the stars and share my memories of the vastness of space I have traveled across. She twines her tendrils with mine. She is dying. If I cannot bring myself to take the boy, I will lose my child. I can wait no longer.

  It is only a body. Less than that, really, for without my help the boy will certainly die.

  I heal the unborn boy and ease my baby’s mind into his newly perfect head. He will be more human than ship, for how could a ship exist in such a tiny and fragile body? His longest journeys will be across the surface of a single planet, and his life will be measured in the turnings of that planet, and not the rotations of the galaxy. He will sleep. But he will live, and when he looks at the stars perhaps he will have echoes of our memories, flashes of the maps in my mind. Perhaps when he looks up, he will remember me.

  *

  The colonists usually remain in stasis until the end of the voyage, but I couldn’t bear to let my son go without holding him. I took his pregnant mother out of stasis so that he could grow. I kept the woman in a deep and dreamless sleep. She’ll be a few months older when we arrive, but she’ll have a healthy child. Surely it’s a fair trade.

  When I arrive at the colony world, I send her into labor. I don’t wake her for the birth. She will have my son for a lifetime, but these first moments are mine. He is tiny. Humans are small creatures—I can fit thousands inside my great bulk—but he is smaller still. I wrap him in my tendrils and keep him warm and close while I wake the other colonists. He cries, he sucks his thumb, he voids his bowels, and he hiccups. His hand flails out and his tiny fingers wrap around one of my tendrils.

  I wake his mother last. She is so happy to see her baby, whole and healthy. She holds him against her chest and walks through my corridors to the shuttle that will take her down to the planet, Last Hope.

  “Thank you,” she whispers, “for saving my baby.”

  I almost stop her. I almost take him back. But his true body has died, and as a human he will be happier on a planet, not alone in space with me.

  I let her take my baby.

  He will never be a ship, but perhaps the stars will call to him. Perhaps he will create a new ship, and do a better job than my fathers did. Perhaps one day he will find me, out among the stars. Those are my foolish dreams, the hopes of an old and damaged mother ship.

  It is more likely that my son will never leave that planet. It is more likely that he will not remember me.

  I will remember for both of us.

  FOUR SEASONS IN THE FOREST OF YOUR MIND

  Spring

  My tree is a pyramidal cell in the prefrontal cortex of your brain.

  There are millions of us here, in the forest of your brain, each with our own region to tend. My region is a single tree, for I am newly born, just as you are. It is a lovely tree, with a long axonal root and majestic dendritic branches that reach outward to receive the signals of other neurons. Like you, the tree is in a springtime state of frenetic growth, reaching its delicate tendrils to nearby cells and more distant targets. The Omnitude has given me a simple task, a message that comes to me via the entanglement: Save this tree.

  The tree is one of billions, floating in a sea of cerebrospinal fluid and held in place by star-shaped glial cells. Capillaries weave through the cells, rivers of blood pulsing in time with the beat of your heart. Neurotransmitters strike the branches of my tree like chemical rain, but the roots do not pass the signal onward. The pathway is weak and must be strengthened.

  An elder tends a tree that connects to mine. I recognize the elder’s status by the complexity of spi
nes protruding from the sphere of its outer surface. I have two spines, two points of entanglement. The elder has hundreds, perhaps thousands. It knows a greater portion of the Omnitude, the gestalt consciousness, the sum of all our entanglements. I am smaller than a neuronal tree, but the Omnitude is a network of trillions of individuals, encompassing the entire planet. Alone we are small, but together we are vast.

  The elder calls a star-shaped cell to wrap itself around the root of the tree it tends, preventing ions from leaking away. Electrical pulses fire with increased frequency, triggering the release of neurotransmitters, and the chemical rain becomes a downpour against the dendritic branches of my tree.

  In response, my tree fires electrical pulses a dozen times a second. It is not enough.

  The axonal root of my tree is bare and exposed, with no protective coating to prevent the leak of electrical ions. I try to lure one of the star-shaped cells that should perform this function, but I fail. The elder from the adjacent tree has moved on to another task. I do not know why the star-shaped cells avoid my tree. All I know is that my tree is not functioning properly.

  You have billions of other neurons and will not notice the death of this one, but this neuronal tree is part of a pathway that the Omnitude believes is important. I decide to cover the root with the substance of my own body, in a process usually reserved for replication. I excrete long gray strands and wrap them around the root of my tree. It is not the same as strands of star-cell stuff, but it will stop the leak of ions and strengthen the place of my tree in the vast interconnectivity of your brain.