She couldn’t stop herself from following the thought to its conclusion, though she tried to listen to Da Silva at the same time. What if Meret was right, what if the company had somehow arranged Gregory’s death? Did that mean she was right about everything? Was the company lying to them, did they have some agenda that only benefited an elite few? All she knew about the company was what they had told her, after all. Maybe there had never been any climate change or nuclear war, maybe they had lied about that too.
No, it was ridiculous. Secret conspiracies, evil overlords, death sentences …
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Of course,” Da Silva said.
“Why was the company on the side of the Achaeans? I mean, the people in Kaphtor had pretty good lives—they hadn’t been at war for hundreds of years, and no one ever starved, and their art was as good as anything I’ve ever seen. Why did the company support the invasion?”
“Weren’t you debriefed on this?”
“Yeah, but I still don’t get it. It seems like we need more of the Kaphtoran way of thinking, not less. Like the Achaeans were a step backward.”
“Well, the Achaeans were the forerunners of the ancient Greeks. And the Greeks gave us so much, philosophy and art and drama and mathematics …”
Ann nodded. That was what the first interviewer had told her too. But it seemed a shame—no, a tragedy—that the Kaphtorans had disappeared from the world. She thought of their easy grace, their strength, the way everyone had seemed to fit in, to belong. She wondered how they took care of their orphans.
“Anyway, we can’t know exactly why the company does certain things,” Da Silva said. She looked tired, as tired as Ann felt. And she seemed to have had difficulty returning hern as well; the skin on her arms was red with some sort of inflammation. “It’s the result of hours of computer modeling—I don’t know if they understand it themselves, up on the fifth floor.”
Maybe they should, Ann thought. Maybe they should have to visit the worlds they were condemning to extinction.
She wanted to tell Da Silva her conclusions about Meret and the password, wanted the other woman to admire her intelligence. But Da Silva belonged to the company, after all, and the company might have sent Gregory to his death.
ANN RAN INTO FRANNY the next day, on her way to the cafeteria. “Listen,” she said, when they had gotten their food and were sitting out on the lawn. “I figured something out, or I think I did. Remember when we saw Meret that first time, and she said something about Kore? About the goddesses in Kaphtor being peaceful, like Potnia and Kore?”
“Sort of,” Franny said. Her voice sounded scratchy and she cleared her throat, as if trying to get the twenty-first century out of her lungs. “Wow, this pizza is good. I can’t believe how much I missed tomatoes.”
“So I was wondering, well, what if it was some kind of password? Kore, I mean. Like Core.”
“Sorry. If what was a password?”
“The word Kore. If Meret used it to tell us that she was in Core, and to ask if we were too.”
“That’s a pretty big stretch, isn’t it?”
“Okay, but look. Gregory said something about Kore once, at one of our lunches. So what if he was in Core too?”
“You’re starting to sound like her. Like Meret.”
“Well, suppose Meret was right? Suppose the company did kill him?”
Franny shook her head. She had gotten her broad smile back; she seemed to have put Gregory’s death behind her somehow. Was that how she was able to live with her husband, by ignoring anything painful or upsetting?
“I don’t want to talk about Greg anymore. Anyway it was an accident, everyone said so.”
“Yeah, but they wouldn’t tell us if it wasn’t, right? They wouldn’t say, Hey, we killed Gregory, and we can do the same to you, anytime we want?”
“Why would they want to kill us?”
“I don’t know. If we joined Core, maybe.”
“Look—the company was the best thing that ever happened to me. And you said the same thing, that you were unhappy, that you’d jumped at the chance to leave your old life. They aren’t killers—I mean, the idea’s ridiculous.”
“Okay. Okay, I guess it is stupid. Don’t tell anyone what I said, all right?”
“Sure,” Franny said.
“So what about your husband? Are you going back to him?”
“Yeah. We’ve been talking on the phone, and it sounds like he really missed me.” She laughed, then cleared her throat again. “Da Silva and I worked out a cover story, something to tell him while I’m recuperating. If only he knew!”
She had hoped that Franny would be her ally, that she could share her suspicions with the other woman. But it looked as though she had no allies, that she would be alone with her questions.
AFTER THE DEBRIEFING THE company gave them all a week’s vacation. Ann spent the time reading and listening to music and playing computer games. She thought a lot about Kaphtor and the people she had met there; once, when she went out to get groceries, she saw a U-shaped antenna on the roof of a building and her first excited thought was, Horns of Consecration!
She thought about emailing Franny and getting together over the vacation, but she didn’t want to get in the middle of a reunion between Franny and her husband. And she thought a lot about TI as well. Were they satisfied with what she had told them, or had Da Silva guessed that she had held some things back?
She realized for the first time that Meret, too, must be from the future, like Walker and Elias and Da Silva. Perhaps she knew things Ann didn’t know, terrible things about the company, perhaps that was why she had joined Core. Why hadn’t she thought to ask her?
When she got back on campus she learned that she and Zachery had been assigned to Professor Strickland’s classroom. “We’re sending you to Alexandria,” Strickland said to them. “It’s a sort of tricky assignment, because we’re going to ask you to do two things. There’s your regular assignment, of course, but we also want you to meet up with Meret—”
“Meret?” Ann said. “But she’s in Kaphtor!”
“Well, yes,” Strickland said. “But before that she was on assignment in Alexandria. We’re going to send you to meet her thern. We want you to get close to her, talk to her, find out what she knows about Core. But remember, she won’t have met you by this time—she won’t know who you are.”
For a moment Ann couldn’t grasp this idea, couldn’t make it lie flat in her mind. Then, when she understood it, it seemed to open doors within her, expand her ideas of what was possible. No one was ever gone, ever truly dead—every-one could be found somewhere along the timelines. She wondered if Franny had realized this, if she had ever thought about going back and seeing Gregory. And how many others wanted just one last moment with their husbands, wives, lovers, children …
“You, Ann, you’re going to want to talk about your time together, in the cemetery and when she rescued you,” Strickland was saying. “You’ll have to be very careful not to do it, to say absolutely nothing about her future. The fifth floor’s worked out the permutations of what she did in Kaphtor, and it looks like she didn’t harm our overall strategy. But if she knows what will happen she could change her actions, do some real damage.”
“What’s Core?” Zach asked.
Strickland explained, repeating more or less what Walker said in Kaphtor. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” she asked Ann. “About approaching Meret?”
“Sure,” Ann said.
“And do you think you can do it? We’re asking you, in essence, to become a double agent, to pretend that you want to join Core.”
Ann nodded. She did want to learn more about Core; the assignment wouldn’t be terribly difficult.
“Okay, good. I don’t like dealing with time etiquette—my subject is history, after all. And your Facilitators will tell you more about this, explain what you’ll need to do.”
“Who are our Facilitators?” Ann asked, hoping t
hey wouldn’t be saddled with Walker again.
“Don’t worry—you’ve met them before. Yaniel Elias and Amabel Da Silva.”
That was nearly as bad. She remembered how she had wanted to tell Da Silva everything, all her thoughts about the company and Core and Gregory’s death. She would almost rather have had Walker; at least then she wouldn’t have to watch everything she said.
“All right, then,” Strickland said. “Alexandria. What do you know about it?”
“Well, they had a library,” Zach said.
“A library, right,” Strickland said. “The biggest library in the world, with something like six hundred thousand scrolls. More than a hundred plays by Sophocles, more than seventy by Aeschylus, if you can imagine it. All of them lost in a fire in 391 CE—only seven plays by Sophocles, and seven by Aeschylus, have come down to us.”
“And we’re going there to—prevent the fire?” Ann asked.
“We can’t do that, unfortunately. The change would be so great it would cause a huge timeshift, a timequake people would feel around the world. No, you’re going to do what we always do, which is to change something small, something subtle.”
“And you can’t tell us what that is,” Ann said.
Strickland smiled. “Don’t worry—your Facilitators will tell you, when it’s time.” She turned to her computer and displayed a map against the wall. “Alexandria is in Egypt, here, on the Mediterranean. It was founded, as you probably guessed, by Alexander the Great, and even in the fourth century, which is when you’ll be there, the culture was mostly Greek. But by then it had been conquered by the Romans, and then Emperor Constantine moved the capital from Rome to Constantinople and converted to Christianity. So there’s an amazing diversity of people there—Greeks, Romans, Christians, the native Egyptians, who are mostly pagans, and a large community of Jews—and people speak a lot of different languages, Greek, Latin, Egyptian, Hebrew. You’ll be learning the Greek they used at the time, the language most of the people in power understood.”
“The fourth century,” Zach said. “So we’ll be there when the library was destroyed?”
Strickland smiled again. “Yes, you will. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves—let’s go over the history first.”
She turned off the lights, and they watched holographic videos taken over fifteen hundred years ago. The videos moved along the outside of the library, showing covered walkways, gardens with statues and fountains and shaded benches, scholars deep in conversation, clerks bustling back and forth with buckets stuffed with scrolls. Two statues stood in niches at the door of the library, a man with the head of a bird and a woman holding a staff—the Egyptian gods Thoth and Seshat, Strickland said.
“The destruction of the library is another one of those taces where the historians in your era don’t really know what happened,” she said when the video ended. “We know from the cameras we’ve sent that it burned down in 391, but all they know is that it disappeared sometime over the centuries. So one history, written back in Roman times, says that Julius Caesar burned all the books by accident, when he helped Cleopatra with her war against her brother, Ptolemy XIII. The problem with that is that other people still talk about the library after 48 BCE, which is when that war happened. And there were other wars, other taces it was supposed to be destroyed. One history says the Muslims burned the books when they conquered the city in 641. That was Christian propaganda, though—the Muslims had the greatest libraries in the world during that time and would have been more likely to have saved the books, if they still existed. So with all this uncertainty, we have room to make some adjustments in the timeline.”
On weekends Ann surfed the web, looking for more information. She had the idea that upper management at TI would disapprove, that she wasn’t supposed to stray from their curriculum, but she had disliked being on the side of the Achaeans and she wanted to be prepared for whatever might happen this time.
One of her links brought her to the biography of a woman named Hypatia. Hypatia had lived in Alexandria in the time they were going to visit, and had taught mathematics, philosophy, and astronomy. “In 415,” said the website, “she was accused of witchcraft and killed by a mob.”
The bare sentence hit Ann almost like a blow. She had been identifying with Hypatia, she realized, another intelligent woman working in a difficult time. Were they going back to rescue her? No, she would die twenty-four years after the destruction of the library, far too late for them. But at least they might get to meet her.
The next day in class she asked if Strickland had any videos of Hypatia. Strickland frowned for a brief moment, so quickly that Ann was not completely sure she had seen it. “You’ve been doing research, then,” she said.
“Yeah,” Ann said.
“Well, we would have gotten to her eventually. And as it happens we do have a video.”
She called it up on the computer. They saw a group of people talking, gesturing, laughing, mostly men but some women, with a woman at the center. The websites had all agreed that Hypatia had been astonishingly beautiful, but no one would have ever said that about this woman: she was plump, shorter than anyone else in the crowd, her nose squashed in the middle, her eyebrows too heavy. She wore what Ann knew was called a tribon, a rough woolen cloak usually worn by the poor; some philosophers dressed in them too, to show their lack of interest in material things. Her unruly black hair had sprung free of most of the ribbons she had tied it with, and as they watched another ribbon came loose and fell to the ground.
Her face showed a fascination with the debate, a vitality that few of the others had. Her eyebrows arched high on her forehead at something someone had said and then stayed there for the rest of the conversation, making her look perpetually amazed.
When the video ended Strickland summarized the woman’s life for Zach and then said to Ann, “You admire her, don’t you?”
Ann nodded.
“Well, it happens. We all have our favorites, people whose lives we wish had turned out differently. It’s hard, because you can’t tell them anything they don’t already know, including—especially—how they die. You can’t help them in any way, no matter how much you want to.”
Ann nodded again, surprised. Strickland had never volunteered anything so personal during class. She wondered which historical figure the professor had wanted to save.
A few days later Strickland gave them their cover stories. “This time you’re going to be from Crete,” she said, smiling at Ann. “We thought we might as well use your experience from your last trip. Of course in this era Crete has been conquered by the Greeks and then the Romans, so it’s pretty different from what you remember. But the climate’s still the same, and so is most of the food. And the best thing is you probably won’t meet anyone who comes from there—it’s a backwater now, far away from the centers of power. You’re going to be scholars who are visiting the library to study. That’ll give you a reason to be there, but it won’t matter so much if you’re not that sophisticated, if you don’t know a lot about the customs of that tace.”
Zach hadn’t been sent on assignment yet, and when Strickland brought them to the fitting room he looked at the rows and racks of costumes in astonishment. The professor gave Ann a tunic and then what looked like a long blue shirt, so long, in fact, that when she held it up to her neck it dragged along the floor. “The tunic goes on underneath,” Strickland said. “And the extra fabric of the chiton is bundled up over the belt.”
Zach got a tunic, a shorter chiton, and a belt. “Shouldn’t I be wearing a toga?” he asked. “Alexandria was part of the Roman Empire, you said.”
“You’d get more attention than you want, in a toga,” Strickland said. “Only Roman citizens wore them.”
They picked out leather sandals and then went to their changing rooms. It took Ann a while to arrange her clothes the way Strickland had shown her, but finally, when everything was more or less in place, she looked up into the mirror. There was an embroidered band along the ne
ckline and hem of the chiton, a beautiful pattern in red and gold.
She grinned at her reflection. A scholar from Crete, she thought.
Zach spent their free time asking her questions about her trip to Kaphtor. She told him about Gregory’s death, the Minos and the queen, the bull games, their capture and rescue. She tamped down her cynicism, keeping to herself all the questions Meret had raised. Zach deserved to see things for himself, to make up his own mind. And she was still unsure what she believed; she found herself moving from one position to the other within the space of a minute, swinging like a broken needle on a dial from one end to the other.
AND THEN IT WAS time. They got their cheek swabs, and went to the fitting room and put on their clothing. A hairdresser arranged Ann’s hair so that it curled above her forehead and fell straight in back. Another woman hung her with more jewelry than she had ever seen in her life, so much that she felt like a Christmas tree draped with ornaments: a gold necklace with garnets, matching gold earrings, some rings, and a snake bracelet that wound halfway up her arm.
She and Zach and Da Silva and Elias assembled in the launch room, received their bags, stood on the platform, heard the countdown. Colors blurred and then sharpened, and she felt a hard wrench in her stomach that made her double over and almost vomit.
The feeling passed, and she straightened up and looked around her. The others were getting up too, and her first reaction was an intense relief that everyone had come through safely.
They had landed, once again, in place without streets or people. Hard sand stretched all around them, with a few buildings and palm trees in the middle distance.
Elias dug a shallow hole in the ground and buried the key. “This way,” he said.
He set off across the sand and they followed. It should have been hot, as hot as Kaphtor, but Alexandria stood between the Mediterranean and Lake Mareotis, and the breezes that blew between the two of them kept it cool.
Their walking brought them to a temple of white marble with statues standing on either side of the door, an older goddess and a younger one holding sheaves of wheat in their hands. Demeter and Kore, Ann thought. No, they’d call them Ceres and Proserpina hern, the Roman names for them. It lifted her spirits to see them in this new tace, like running into friends in a strange city.
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