Time Twisters

by RABE, JEAN

  Fire exploded over my knuckles as they smashed into his nose. It felt like I’d broken my hand. My eyes and my mouth watered with the pain.

  He yelped and rocked back, the expression on his face almost funny as blood poured down over his mouth.

  I wanted to moan, to cradle my hand and rock and cry. No one had ever told me it hurt so much to hit someone. Small wonder that Gnash preferred rocks and bats and such. But I couldn’t afford to be weak and stupid now. I stood up and picked up his bat before he could think to do it. “You go. Go now,” I said, and I could hear Gnash’s meanness in my voice. Old Jerry had taught me more than I knew, and so had Gnash.

  Fear slid across his face.

  Joy and something I couldn’t name, something hot and laughing, rushed into my chest like water pouring over rocks. The bat trembled in my hand.

  Gnash stood up slowly. His hand slid toward his pocket.

  I steadied the bat. “Go now. Before I call Old Jerry’s friends.”

  For a minute, I was afraid he wasn’t going to do it. I was afraid he was going to fight me. I knew I couldn’t beat him. I was taller, but he was stronger. I was clumsy and he was quick. He knew how to fight dirty, and I didn’t know how to fight at all. But maybe my fiery new backbone would count for something. I wouldn’t go down quietly, the way I had so many times before. Maybe he saw that in my face.

  He made one snarling last attempt to save face. “You think those old coots gonna look after you like I do? What you gonna do now? Stay down here?”

  I lifted the bat a little higher.

  He backed away, gnashing so hard I could hear the bones of his teeth grinding together. Blood was still pouring out of his nose, and his voice was beginning to sound squashed. “I shoulda left you in the street. How long you think you’re gonna live without me to protect you, stupid?”

  “My name,” I said slowly, “is Rosemary.”

  He reached down and snatched up the piece of fancy cloth, swiped at the blood on his face. He wheeled around and stomped away, flinging a few last words over his shoulder. “Don’t come begging back tomorrow.”

  I started to shake. So hard that I had to sit down. The bat hit the floor only a little harder than my butt did. Then I snatched it up again, crawled to the edge of the room and snaked a quick look.

  Gnash was way across the large room, beginning the trek back to above. He had one hand up to his face.

  When I was sure he wasn’t coming back, I crawled around the space, gathering Old Jerry’s treasure. My treasure now.

  My gram had loved the old oak trees above all other living things on this world, save for me. I’d thought the trees were dying, but somewhere, in one of Old Jerry’s driftings, he’d found an oak tree that wasn’t dying. Maybe that meant there were better places. Places where the earth was starting to live again. My gram had said there would be, if I just had the guts to go looking.

  I’d only had pictures. In one of the books Gnash had burned, I’d even marked the page. If he’d ever bothered to look at it, he’d have known what Old Jerry’s treasure was . . .

  Acorns. Five precious acorns.

  CHAOS THEORY

  Stephen Leigh

  “Professor?” Damian glanced up from his laptop. “Oh, hey, Sarah. Come on in. Here . . .” He snatched the pile of books from the other chair in the small office and leaned them against the side of the desk. “Excuse the mess.”

  As she sat, he saw her glance move from the stacks of papers and folders on his desk to the haphazardly packed bookcase behind him, where the books lay in archeological layers. “Don’t worry. I’ve seen the other professors’ offices. Is it a rule that you all have to have to fill every available inch with paper and books?”

  “It’s a bit of an occupational hazard,” he answered.

  She laughed at the standard reply. “At least I see some science fiction and fantasy in among all that dry stuff. So I guess there’s hope for you after all.” She was sitting with her thighs pressed together inside the denim skirt that came to just above her knees, her lower legs splayed out to either side, her feet wrapped in low-heeled shoes. She had wonderful legs. Damian had noticed them before, since she generally sat in the front row of his class. Sarah was a nontraditional student, returning to school after some time away. Damian figured her to be in her late twenties; she was an excellent student, attentive and interested, unlike some of the seemingly bored regular students, just out of high school and enrolled in college simply because it was what they were expected to do. One hand was on her lap, the other on the arm of the chair: nails painted a cheerful red. Unlike most of the students, she had no backpack, only a copiously pocketed leather laptop bag such as a corporate manager might carry. She wore several rings, but there were none on the third finger of her left hand. In the small, cramped office, their knees nearly touched.

  Unlike half the young women in his classes, who were either anemic in appearance or heavily overweight, Sarah had the appearance of someone who enjoyed food and good times, yet who kept herself in shape. He could imagine her jogging, or perhaps going to a gym a few times a week . . .

  He kept his gaze on her face, though. It was safer. Sarah’s was a pleasant face with an engaging smile, and eyes that were the color of the Mediterranean Sea in some travel brochure. Damian was certain she wore colored contacts; the blue was too saturated to be real. Her hair was dyed a blonde that verged on white, cropped too short for Damian’s taste, the strands closest to her scalp just showing her natural brown. He told himself that the undistinguished hue of her roots would have suited him better.

  He smiled at her as he closed the lid of his Power-book and leaned back carefully on his desk chair; the mechanism was broken and would recline far enough to tip the chair if he wasn’t careful. He’d have ordered a new one, but the Arts & Sciences budget, like every other college’s budget in the university (but somehow not the athletic department’s), had been trimmed to the bone—replacing office furniture was a low priority. “So what’s up?” he asked her.

  Now that she was sitting, she seemed nervous. One shoulder lifted in a shrug. She started to say something, then closed her mouth and started over. “I wanted to ask you—your lecture this morning . . . I’m curious. Is all that something you really believe?” Her head was cocked slightly to the side, and the smile had been replaced by a more serious expression. They’d had conversations before: she was one of the three or four students who generally lingered a few minutes after class to ask questions about the lecture or just talk, or who came early and chatted with him as he arranged his notes. But she’d never come to his office before.

  “It’s a hypothesis,” he told her. “I’m open to persuasive arguments against it, of course, but yes, I think it’s valid. It was the core of my thesis.”

  “It seems rather . . . cynical. You’re what, thirty?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “I’m twenty-eight. So we’re nearly the same age. But I don’t think of myself as old—not yet, anyway.” Her laugh was self-deprecating and soft. “What you were saying sounded so . . . cynical, and I suppose I equate that with age. You already think that history is written for you and you can’t change it. I find that sad.”

  He was shaking his head. “You misunderstood what I was saying, Sarah. My history—or yours—isn’t written, and neither is history in general. I’m only saying that the inertia of the past drives the present into the future, and that the momentum and ‘weight’—if you don’t mind my using that term for something that has no actual weight—of previous events doesn’t allow for its course to be changed. It’s too big for us to alter. We don’t know where history’s going, but even if we did we couldn’t stop it no matter what we tried. I don’t see any cynicism in that.”

  He stopped. Smiled tentatively. “Slipped into lecture mode there, didn’t I? Sorry.”

  She nodded, returning the smile. She kept eye contact with him; every time he looked away and then back, her gaze was there. He’d noticed that about h
er in class; she watched him, kept her attention on him. He found he liked that. They often made eye contact during his lectures. “You don’t have to apologize. I’ve been trying to find an analogy,” she said, and her gaze did drop for a moment, almost demurely, before those deepsea pupils returned to him again. “Something to use as a picture. I was thinking: a hurricane is huge, yet their paths can change. Sometimes quickly and radically.”

  “Sure, but what changes a hurricane’s path?” As he often did in class, he answered his own question. “An equally huge force: a high pressure cell sitting in the Midwest, or shearing winds from the jet stream. But one of us . . . As a single person, we can’t do anything to affect it. In fact, you could have everyone in the hurricane’s path try to blow it away, all at once, to no effect. You could turn on every last fan on the entire coastline, and you’re not going to change the path by even a foot.”

  She chuckled at the image he’d painted: a warm, throaty amusement. “So I guess having the Chinese jump up on command won’t change the earth’s orbit, either? Damn, another illusion gone.” They both laughed. “All right, so hurricanes might be a lousy metaphor. But history’s all about people. You said that going back in time to kill Hitler’s parents before they conceive him wouldn’t stop WWII or the Holocaust. How could it not?”

  She inclined toward him, her elbows on the arms of the chair and hands cupping her chin. He could smell perfume: faint and floral and pleasant. He started to lean back in the chair, nearly overbalanced and had to bring himself forward abruptly. His face was suddenly a few bare inches from hers.

  Her eyes widened, and he sat back quickly, embarrassed. He fiddled with the papers on his desk, rearranging them uselessly. “Sorry. This chair . . .”

  “No problem. You were saying, about Hitler?”

  “Ah, that . . . I’d argue that the Third Reich wasn’t the result of a person, but a social tsunami. Hitler’s rise was the consequence of political and social forces at work in Europe and especially in Germany at the time. If Adolf hadn’t been there, someone else would have been ridden the wave of that movement, someone with essentially the same attitudes and outlooks. The Nazi Party, or something very much like it, would still arise, with its dictatorship and imperialistic attitude, and with its scorn and hatred of what it considered ‘lesser races.’ The same scenes would play out: changed to some degree, yes, but not altered in any truly significant manner. History would lumber on following the same path.”

  He shifted in his seat and now his foot brushed hers accidentally; they both moved back, both pretended not to notice. “With all the standard ‘alternate histories, ’ it’s the same,” he continued. “Look at the discovery of penicillin. Ernest Duchesne recognized its antibiotic qualities way back in 1896, but the French Institut Pasteur ignored the discovery—and even if they hadn’t, I’d contend, something else would have intervened to keep the discovery quiet. It wasn’t time yet. Had Alexander Fleming failed to notice the penicillin in his lab in 1928, well, then the spores would have wafted down to contaminate some other scientist’s Petri dish—and we’d still get the vaccine. Same way with more current events: if some circumstance could somehow have stopped the planes from hitting the World Trade Center, we’d just experience some other seminal terrorist attack and still become embroiled in a Middle Eastern war. I’ve done the research, believe me. The currents of social, economic and political trends are strong; they will sweep away anything standing in their path. It’s analogous to chaos theory in physics: history as a system appears random but—like the atmosphere and your hurricanes—is actually just immensely complex: a deterministic system with no random parameters. If you want justification, I can give you several references . . . ” He started to turn to pull books from the case nearest the desk. Her voice stopped him.

  “Lecture mode,” she told him. The remonstration was gentle and amused. “You really need to watch that.”

  “Sorry,” he told her. “Again.”

  “And you still don’t need to apologize. I rather like how excited and passionate you sound when you get going. The thing is, you can’t prove any of that.” Her gaze held him, snared. “I mean, I do understand what you’re saying and I can see why how you can make the argument and I’ll even buy it, to some degree, but ultimately, you can’t ever know. No one can put history in a cyclotron and break it down.”

  “No, I suppose we can’t—and that’s why I’m in the philosophy department, not physics. You’re right, there’s no experiment we can conduct to prove or disprove the theorem. At least not without a time machine—and even then it’s not an experiment I think any rational person would care to make. If I’m right, nothing changes in any significant way. But if I’m wrong, then there are wholesale changes, changes we can’t control. Of course, time travel isn’t possible, so—”

  “Actually, the physics department might disagree with that,” she interrupted. “String theory.” Grinned. “But go on . . .”

  He found himself grinning back at her. “Yeah, I’ve read some of that too. But for now, it all remains a thought experiment.”

  Her hand brushed his thigh—the barest touch—and then withdrew. He could feel the heat of her skin through his jeans. “It still comes down to this,” she said. “You believe in Capital-D Destiny. That story of Bradbury’s that you mentioned in class . . .”

  He nodded, still feeling the touch. He saw her glance at the bookcase, where R Is For Rocket adorned a spine. “ ‘A Sound of Thunder.’ ”

  “Yes. You’d say that stepping on the butterfly back in the Cretaceous changes nothing. The ‘inertia’ of history is too great.”

  “Essentially.”

  “I don’t agree. I think even a single person matters.” She pressed her spine against the chair then, abruptly moving away from him, and he found himself sliding forward in response, as if their bodies were bound together with an unseen string.

  “Of course you do,” he told her. “We all want to believe that. Thinking that way comforts us. We all want to feel that we have some power, that we can make a difference, that our lives have some higher purpose and that actions we take can shake the very foundations of the reality around us. I understand that. I just don’t believe it.”

  She leaned in again, and he didn’t move. Their faces were very close. “But actually you do . . . ” She stopped, then, her cheeks coloring as her gaze dropped.

  “Go on,” he told her.

  She looked at him again, though the color heightened on her face. “This is so stupid . . . After class, oh, three weeks ago . . . I remember you joking about being married to the school, that you figured that’s just the way it was supposed to be for you. That’s why you’d never found someone to be with.”

  “I said that?” Damian frowned. He supposed it was possible; he vaguely remembered an after-class conversation with several students along those lines. “I don’t think—”

  Rose bloomed fully on her cheeks, and she laughed, a bit nervously. “The truth is, I didn’t come here to talk about this morning. Well, I did in a way.” She stopped. Her mouth was still slightly opened.

  “What?” he prompted.

  She nodded, as if to some inner argument. She bit her lower lip for a moment. “I enjoy talking with you. I like the way you start waving your hands when you’re passionate about what you’re saying. I like the gentleness I see in your face and your eyes. I like the sympathy I hear in your voice when someone doesn’t understand you, and how you try to find a way to make it clear to them. All that tells me a lot about you.”

  “I . . . I’m not sure—”

  “Yes, you are,” she told him. “You know what I’m saying.”

  “Um, Sarah . . . ” It wasn’t the first time this had happened, that a student had propositioned him—he wasn’t entirely unattractive, he knew, and if he was a bit shy around women, well, some women found that to be something they liked. But he’d never in his academic career overstepped the bounds. He’d always immediately squashed any hopes o
r expectations the student had.

  He intended to do that now. “Sarah, I’m sorry, but—”

  Her hand touched his. Lingered. He tried to move his hand away but the limb resisted as if it had a will of its own. “Look, I’m not a nineteen-year old, just-out-high-school girl with naïve ideas about life and love, Professor. I’ve been married and divorced. We’re both adults. I don’t have any illusions or even any expectations. You might not be interested in me at all, or be involved with someone else, or we might find after a few hours or a few dates that one or the other of us has changed our minds. I don’t know. But it’s a chance I’d be willing to take. As you said, we don’t know what history holds for us.”

  “You’re my student,” he persisted, and watched her shake her head, her eyes never leaving his.

  “Not any more. Check your class list,” she said. “I withdrew this morning. And I won’t be taking any other courses from you in the future.”

  “Sarah, you didn’t need to do that . . .”

  She smiled, sitting back again. “Yes, I did. I needed you to understand that I’m interested in having the chance to know you better, period. I needed to show you that I’m not hitting on you for a grade. I’m not stalking you. I’m not thinking I’m in love with you, either. I find you interesting, that’s all. Nothing more. I think that feeling might be somewhat mutual, too.” Her eyebrows raised slightly, her gaze moved from one side of his face to the other. “I’m not here at the university for any other reason than I want to expand my knowledge. I take classes where I think I might learn something interesting. I’m not here just to party or have a good time or get laid or find a husband.” She grinned at that. “No matter what you might be thinking right now,” she added. “So . . . ”

  Her hands spread apart. She rose in one lithe movement from the chair, brushing imaginary strands back from her face as she picked up her bag; he wondered how long ago she’d cut that hair. “So I’ve said what I came to say, finally. Sorry it took me so long, and thanks for the conversation—I enjoyed our talk. If you think that maybe you’d like to continue it, I’ll be over at the Boarshead for the next few hours. If you happen to go there yourself to have a beer, I’ll be in a booth back by the rear door. If you happen to stop by. Just to talk. I still want to hear your arguments about changing history.”