Weighing Shadows

by Lisa Goldstein

  A woman sat down next to her, took out her phone, and scrolled through her emails. Her purse hung over the chair closest to Ann. A few years ago she wouldn’t have felt bad about what she was about to do, but her recent paychecks had changed her, made her more sympathetic to people with money. Had made her softer.

  Still watching the woman, she quickly unzipped the purse, dipped her hand inside, and took out the wallet. Then she stood and walked away.

  A few blocks later she stopped and counted the money. A hundred dollars and change, better than she had expected. She had passed a secondhand clothing store a while back, and she went back to it and got a shirt and a pair of pants. There was enough left over for her to go to a pharmacy and get bandages and rubbing alcohol—a different pharmacy this time, so they wouldn’t be suspicious. Then she sat on a bus bench and dressed her wound.

  When she was done she went through the wallet again. It had several credit cards but she couldn’t use them; the woman might have cancelled them already. And the company was probably tied into law enforcement here, and might look for stolen cards as a way to track her. Still, it was growing dark, and she felt sorely tempted to check into a motel, to sleep for several weeks. Instead she found a car that had been left unlocked and stretched out in the back seat.

  She had expected to be up all night, listening for the car’s owner to come back, wondering if her attempt to change history had succeeded. She’d forgotten to look at a newspaper, she realized, and she swore softly.

  Had she made it to July 7? Was there another Ann here somewhere, asleep in her own bed? No, it was too early in the day for that—what would the other Ann be doing now? She tried to figure it out, but she fell asleep instead.

  She woke to see the night around her growing lighter, cars and buildings separating themselves from the darkness. Dawn had come; she hopped out of the car and hurried away.

  The next few days were more of the same. She stole money, food, more clothing. She couldn’t steal a backpack without someone noticing, so she bought one and carried her things around in it. She remembered to look at the date on a newspaper finally, and counted back, and saw that she had managed to return on the day she wanted, July 7. She splurged on a motel for a night and washed herself thoroughly, watching the dirt of the thirteenth century sluice down the drain.

  When she had taken care of the day-to-day stuff she went to a bank and opened a checking account. The only identification she had came from the wallets she had stolen, so she used the name she found in one of them. Then she went to the library and got on a computer.

  For the next few days she tried to break into the computer networks of large, wealthy corporations. It took her longer than she had expected, but when she finally managed it she instructed the company to send a check to her account, and to continue to do this every two weeks.

  She should have done this earlier, she thought, back when she’d been desperately poor. It had not been morality that had held her back but a fear of getting caught. She had grown more confident in her abilities since then, though. And now they had no way to locate her; she had no name, no job or money or apartment. If they found the account she created she could simply walk away; she’d proven she could take care of herself.

  It was dangerous to use a real person’s name, she knew, and she worked on tracking down someone who did fake licenses. Then she looked through the library’s phone books for something innocuous, closing her eyes and pointing to names at random, and finally settled on the name Carla Bowen.

  It was only later that she realized her new name had “car” in it, another Kore name. She decided to keep it anyway; maybe someone would think it was a password.

  By then it was July 21. She had to leave, she knew; the company would be looking for her. They would be angry, too, furious that she had eluded them for so long.

  She took down one of the library’s atlases and studied it. It was astonishing, she thought, how many place names started with “Cor” or “Car.” Had they all been named after Kore, as Azelaïs had said? In addition to the ones Azelaïs had mentioned she found Corsica, Carmel, the Carpathian mountains, Cartagena … the list went on for several columns. And Chartres, which, when she looked it up in a reference book, turned out to have a labyrinth, and a black Madonna, and whose location had once, long ago, been sacred to the Mother Goddess.

  When she got her fake license she looked on Craigslist and bought a secondhand car. It took her a while to get used to it; she had learned how to drive in some long-ago high school class, but she hadn’t been behind a wheel since then. As she headed away she remembered Franny asking her why she didn’t have a car, and her noncommittal answer. Should she try to get in touch with Franny? But the company would be watching both of them; no doubt they had a key-logger on Franny’s computer, and one of their ubiquitous cameras parked outside her house.

  Still, Franny deserved to know what was going on. And she was a friend, one of the few Ann had managed to make in her life. She decided to contact her when she got to wherever she was going, when she knew more.

  She bought a book of maps of the United States, and set off.

  She started in California, driving through Carmel and Carmel Valley, Carmichael near Sacramento, Corcoran to the south, Cartago to the east. As she passed through the small towns and villages, and listened to the radio, she saw that the country had returned more or less to what she remembered, the place it had been before the company had meddled in its history. There were no indications of martial law, or of a dictator poised to take over the government; the president was the same, and the vice president, and the people no more rude than they’d been before, or more dismissive of women.

  At first she went through each town without a plan, not sure what she was looking for. She read the local newspapers, went through the classified ads, walked around the parks and restaurants and city halls.

  As she continued, though, she began to get a feel for what she wanted. She studied graffiti, and looked at the books in the libraries, and talked to shopkeepers and waitresses and librarians.

  She sat through a meeting of Wiccans in Carmel, listening as they planned a naked dance in the forest under a full moon. Their view of the goddess was far too simple, she thought; they seemed to regard her as an oversized mother, wiping away tears and handing out sweets. But she was also the crone, the goddess of death, the woman who killed the Minos once every seven years. Ann could have told them something about that.

  She broadened her search to the rest of the country, to Carthage, Texas, and Carthage, Missouri; Corinth, Mississippi, and Corinth, New York. Then Carmel, New York, and a swing back to Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

  In one small town in upstate New York she found a listing for a club called Daughters of Demeter, a group that, reading between the lines, sounded exactly like what she wanted. When she got there, though, no one seemed to know the password, or the ceremony of the apples. Even worse, they believed only in praying to the goddess; they had no book of prophecies, no knowledge of history, no plans to change the world.

  She did find some similarities, though, after she had listened to them for a while. She thought that they might have split from the sisters of Kore a few hundred years ago. Schisms like that were bound to have happened at some time in history; the only surprise was that there weren’t more of them.

  They hadn’t heard of other groups like them, groups that did more work out in the world. They seemed offended by the question, in fact, and a few of them lectured her on the importance of keeping pure in a polluted world, of not getting her hands dirty, of trusting to the Goddess to know what was best. She wondered if they were telling her the truth, if perhaps they were covering up the existence of a rival group, but she got nothing more from them and finally took her leave.

  After weeks of not finding anything she thought about trying Europe or Africa, somewhere closer to where Meret had worked. When she stopped off in libraries she read about the island of Karpathos, close to Crete, and Corsica
, and Carthage in Tunisia, Corinth in Greece, Carmel in Israel. And Chartres, of course.

  There were an amazing number of black Madonnas in Europe, considering the whiteness of the population. No one seemed to know why they were there or what they represented; one unlikely theory postulated that the statues had simply grown dirtier over the years. They couldn’t all be of Meret, she knew; there was something deeper here than she could understand, and she longed for a time machine to solve the mystery. But some of them had to be her.

  She started collecting words that seemed in some way to do with Kore: charm, chariot, charter, carnal, court, courtesy. Karma, maybe. Carmine, cardiac, corazón.

  The summer was extraordinarily hot, or extraordinarily cold, the start of global warming, some people said. She thought about the terrible pollution in 2327, all the problems their teachers had told them about. Things had improved for them after she and the others had changed history in Carcassonne, Zarifa had said, but then Ann had changed it back, had returned them to their contaminated environment. Had she even had the right to do that? But did the company have the right to make things worse for everyone else?

  Even worse, what if the future wasn’t able to solve its own problems without forcibly changing the past? What if what she had done meant the end of civilization, or at least the beginning of the end? Didn’t she have some responsibility to help them?

  She thought she did—which meant she would not only have to work against the company, she would also need to work at healing the planet, improving the environment for everyone, the present as well as the future. And here too the sisters of Core might be able to help her, she thought. They worshipped the goddesses of the earth, after all; to harm the earth was to harm their goddesses.

  And sometimes, very seldom, she thought about her mother. She had hated the woman for a long time, before she had even known who she was and what she had done. Now she had an additional reason for her hostility: the knowledge that her mother had viewed her with horror, that she had wanted to kill her.

  But, in fairness, the girl Ann had seen in the video had just gone through a painful childbirth, and was still in shock. And she was far too young for any of it, nearly half Ann’s age. That didn’t excuse what she had done, of course, but it did change the story, add a few variables. She understood now that her mother too was a part of the goddess, mother and crone, life and death in one person.

  She had enough clues now to track her mother down. Maybe, she thought, after she had found what she was looking for, she could go searching for her, confront her, and then … And then what? No, it was better to let it all go, to leave things as they were.

  After a month on the road she began to grow discouraged. How could a group like the sisters of Kore have survived for all those long years? The last she had heard of them had been in 1218. Even if they still existed, how could their message have remained intact throughout the centuries?

  And what was she planning to do when she found them? How could she even think of working against the company, an organization with unimaginable technology, people who had time machines, for the Lady’s sake? But if there was one thing she had learned from the company, it was that small gestures could change a world.

  Then, in the middle of the country, in a town so small she had nearly driven past it, she saw the word “Kore” scrawled on the side of a boarded-up house. The library had no information on any group that studied or worshipped the goddess, and when she asked more questions the librarian told her proudly that they were all good God-fearing people here. And she could find nothing on the Internet about the town itself, something she had thought to be impossible in this day and age.

  She got a motel room in a neighboring town and visited every day. She stopped asking questions and instead spent her time walking around the town itself, and when anyone questioned her she told them she liked the place and was thinking about settling down there. None of them looked as if they believed her—the town was dying, and most of the young people had fled—but they left her alone after that.

  She went to a convenience store in the larger town and bought two disposable phones, one for her and one for Franny. She put one of the phones in a padded envelope and addressed it to Franny at the house next door to her; that way, she hoped, the company wouldn’t see it and Franny’s neighbor would bring it over sometime after the mail had been delivered.

  Then, driving around one night after a long day of hiking past farms and pastures, she saw lights on in the abandoned house. She stopped the car and walked up to it. Her heart fluttered in her chest.

  She knocked at the door and a woman opened it. “Hello,” the woman said.

  She was dressed all in white. Candles flickered behind her, and more women in white looked up from their places on the floor.

  “Would you do us the courtesy of joining us?” the woman asked. “And would you eat an apple with us, for your heart’s sake?”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Lisa Goldstein has written fourteen novels and dozens of short stories. Her novel The Uncertain Places won the Mythopoeic Award in 2012. She has also won the American Book Award for Best Paperback for The Red Magician, and the Sidewise Award for her short story “Paradise Is a Walled Garden.” Her stories have appeared in Ms., Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and The Year’s Best Fantasy, among other places, and her novels and short stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. She lives with her husband and their irrepressible Labrador retriever, Bonnie, in Oakland, California.

  Goldstein’s web site is www.brazenhussies.net/goldstein.