Now, Then, and Everywhen (Chronos Origins)

by Rysa Walker

  “No,” Nora says, running one finger across the front of the diary. “My father didn’t write this. I suppose it’s possible that he entered the information into the diary itself, but I could hear her voice coming through as you read. Those are her words. And while she didn’t come out and say anything like My name is Kate Pierce-Keller and I’m a time traveler, it’s there if you read between the lines.”

  This surprises me a bit, because I really didn’t get that sense from the diary at all.

  Nora smiles at my expression. “You didn’t know her. She was a lovely person, but it always seemed to me that she was haunted by something, driven to fix things for which there were no easy remedies. Or at least, no easy remedies given the frailties of human nature, like greed and tribalism. Grandpa Trey would have been happier if she’d been able to relax a bit more and just enjoy life. I never really understood what caused her to push herself so hard, but after listening to what you read tonight, I think she felt guilty for something that happened. Maybe something she changed that she shouldn’t have. Or maybe something she should have changed but didn’t. Or couldn’t. The young woman who wrote those words had a lot of regrets. And more than a little anger. She still did later in life, when I knew her, but somewhere along the way, she found a measure of serenity to balance things out.”

  I’m really hesitant to ask the next question, because Nora herself is fairly serene right now and mentioning her father will almost certainly shatter that tranquility. But I need to know.

  “Do you think your father could use the key? It would explain a lot about the . . . books. And the trial.”

  Nora closes her eyes and is quiet for so long that I’m almost certain she’s fallen asleep. But then she shakes her head slowly. “No. I never saw him with that medallion. And before we had our falling out, we were actually quite close. I would have known.” She gets up to carry our teacups to the adjoining kitchen, then stops, looking back at me over her shoulder. “It’s possible that his brother could. Of course, they’re both dead now, so unless one of them left you an encrypted message in the library—”

  “Or unless I went back and asked them.”

  She gives me a wry smile. “True. But again, speaking as someone who has read many time-travel books in my eight decades of life, isn’t that a rather major no-no?”

  “It’s not like I actually knew either of them. Or they knew me.”

  “Ah, but if your presence changes anything, even alters the movement of a butterfly’s wings a hundred years ago, what might that mean for this timeline?”

  “Absolutely nothing, aside from that butterfly becoming a splat on the side of a delivery drone a few seconds earlier than fate intended.”

  Nora laughs. “You’re probably right. But why take the risk?” She sits back on the edge of the sofa and rolls up her sleeve. “Might as well get the blood drawn now, and then we can get some sleep. I made up the bed in your old room. If you play your cards right, Mercury might even bunk with you.”

  I do, apparently, play my cards right. Mercury is purring contentedly on the pillow next to mine long before I’m able to fall asleep. My mind keeps cycling between the quarrel with my mother and the fact that this device might be able to bring my father back. It’s like that old story about the monkey paw, though—I’m pretty sure that any attempt to save his life would carry a curse. Had Nora’s grandmother done something like that? Had she saved someone she loved and paid a price? Or was the regret and anger due to the fact that she had the power to save them and didn’t act?

  I still can’t quite fall asleep, so I pick up the diary again and click on one of the videos. A finger moves away from the display, and then Kate Pierce-Keller’s face comes into view. She’s saying something about the Cyrists and climate change. It’s hard to pay attention to the specifics, however, because four odd things hit me almost instantaneously.

  The first oddity is that she’s whispering. That mystery is quickly solved, however. As she leans back from the camera, I realize that she’s trying to avoid waking the little boy who is curled up in her lap. He’s maybe two or three years old, clutching a blanket with stars on a dark blue background.

  A second weird thing is that Kate and the little boy are sitting in what I have very quickly come to think of as my living room in Bethesda. All of the furniture is different, of course, but I can see one of the two curved stairways that lead up to the second floor over her shoulder.

  Third, just as she begins talking, a new link pops up directly beneath the video. Unlike all of the other file links I’ve seen in the diaries, which contain initials and two date strings, this one is labeled COPIED FROM OTHER-KATE RE: CYRISTS Fort Meyer 040302.

  Last, but definitely not least, is how very familiar Kate looks. For some reason, that fact is jumping out at me more than anything else, but that’s silly. Of course she looks familiar. I’ve probably seen photographs of her in a family album, and it’s perfectly reasonable that there might be a resemblance among family members.

  It still nags at me, though, and I stop the video and zoom in. That’s when I realize why the resemblance feels strange to me. Kate Pierce-Keller is Nora’s grandmother. If there’s a family resemblance, it should be to Nora or my father. But this woman looks a lot like my mom.

  More to the point, she looks almost exactly like my other grandmother, Thea Randall. Kate is younger here, and Thea’s eyes are blue, not green. But otherwise, the likeness is uncanny. My mom has a framed image of herself taken when she was around seven and Thea is in her thirties. This woman could be Thea’s twin.

  None of this makes sense. But what Nora said earlier about tracking down my globe-trotting maternal grandmother seems a lot more pressing now.

  I click on the link that mentions Other-Kate. It’s not a video, as I expected, which is unusual. All of the other links have been multimedia. Instead, it’s a text entry. And I soon realize that there’s a good reason Kate might have chosen to give it the extra security of nesting it inside a link. While nothing else in the diary has been a smoking gun, this short entry is red-hot.

  I read it through a second time, coming back to the final paragraph:

  While some of the kids taken in by the Koreshans are actually local orphans, this Kiernan guy claims that most of them are, in fact, Prudence’s offspring. That’s why I need to be careful how I break this news to Katherine. Telling her that the Koreshans really are integrally connected to the Cyrists is the easy part. The part I’m dreading is telling her that her long-lost daughter isn’t just helping Saul. She’s making him an army of time travelers.

  The name Prudence is, of course, familiar. Anyone who has ever known a devout Cyrist has heard them say “Praise Prudence” before their first bite of lunch. But I’ve never thought of her as an actual person, a person who might be someone’s aunt, any more than I’ve thought of Krishna or Buddha in that way.

  I try to tap into Nora’s digital assistant to see if I can find images of Kate, but Nora has changed the password. I don’t want to wake her, and even though my head is still spinning, my eyes are exhausted. So I turn off the recording and let Mercury’s soft purr lull me to sleep.

  Nora is awake long before I am, watching a VRE on her ancient headset. When she hears me coming downstairs, she puts it aside, and we take breakfast in the small sunroom that overlooks the seawall. She’s in a cheery mood, and I realize that there is one substantial silver lining in this situation for both of us. Even though she has close friends nearby and a more active social life than my own, it’s not the same as having family close by. I call pretty regularly, but I’ve worried about her being on her own so much at her age. Weekly transatlantic flights aren’t in my current budget, but with this device, I can pop in for a visit more often.

  Assuming, of course, that I don’t wind up imprisoned for illegal genetic enhancements.

  Between anecdotes about her euchre club and the wine-making class that she’s taking at the university, I ask Nora if she has any pictures of Kate.r />
  “I’m sure I do somewhere.” She pulls up her wall screen and does a brief search, and then three images appear side by side. They seem to be in chronological order. The first two are family photographs of her with a tall, light-haired man Nora identifies as her grandfather Trey Coleman and two boys—young in the first photo and in their teens in the second. In both of these, she looks much like she did in the video—long, dark curls and vivid green eyes. The third picture shows a woman in her sixties or seventies, with a cloud of silver hair.

  “She looks like Thea,” I say.

  Nora doesn’t seem too surprised. “I never met her, since she didn’t bother showing up for the wedding. But I told Matthew the first time he brought Mila to meet us that his new girl looked quite a bit like Grandma Kate. He laughed and said she must have made a good impression on him the few times he met her, back when he was too young to really remember.”

  “I agree that she looks a bit like Mom. But, Nora—that first picture of Kate is almost identical to Thea in her thirties, and, aside from the eyes, that last picture of her could easily be Thea today . . . although I doubt Thea would ever let her hair go white. I’m serious. They could be twins.”

  Nora frowns. “Well, aside from the fact that one was born in 1999 and the other in—how old is Thea?”

  “A few years younger than you. I think she was born in 2060.”

  “So twins born six decades apart. I can tell from your expression that you don’t think this is a coincidence, but I’m not sure what you think it means.”

  “Neither am I,” I admit. “She could be a clone. That was semi-legal for a while.”

  “True. That would mean Matthew and Mila were what—second cousins? Or third?”

  I tally it up mentally. “I don’t know what you’d call them if Thea was cloned. It’s close to double cousins, but there’s not really a term for it. And—” I stop and shake my head. “No.”

  “What?” Nora asks.

  “I was just thinking that Thea could actually be Kate. If she was able to use the medallion, I mean. Maybe my grandmother is also your grandmother, and that’s why she didn’t come to the wedding. You’d have recognized her.”

  Nora’s eyes grow wide, and I laugh.

  “No. I don’t really think Thea and Kate are the same person. Their faces are eerily alike, but there are tiny differences aside from the easily altered eye color. And that probably rules out a clone, too, although I suppose there could be tiny differences due to environmental factors. That’s something I’ll have to ask Lorena when I see her, although I really wish I was going back with both of the blood samples she requested. But an embryo frozen in 1999 could very easily have been born sixty years later. And . . .”

  I pull out the diary and read the Other-Kate entry. “Do you remember Grandma Kate mentioning an Aunt Prudence?” I ask when I reach the end.

  “No. But I do remember her using the phrase praise frickin’ Prudence on more than one occasion when she was annoyed.”

  I open my mouth to ask her to run an image search, but she’s one step ahead of me. The search results that pop up on the wall screen are mostly religious art, and there’s a good deal of variation in the artists’ renderings. But even without the two photographs of a middle-aged Prudence from the early 2000s, the resemblance is clear.

  “That could be Thea,” I say. “I mean, if you add a bunch of tattoos and piercings. Even the eyes are the same.”

  Nora puts the picture of Kate next to the search results. “She could easily have been Kate’s sister. Or aunt, I guess. You need to take all of this back to Mila. She must know more than she’s letting on.”

  I think back to my mom, curled almost in a fetal position in her tiny apartment. “She does know more. But it may be a while before she’ll admit it.”

  “Well, maybe she’ll be more reasonable in a few days.”

  I nod, even though I doubt it.

  “Did your grandmother ever mention her grandfather? The one who . . .” I trail off, because I’m not sure how to phrase the rest. “Katherine Shaw’s partner.”

  Nora thinks for a moment, then shakes her head. “I don’t think he was in the picture. Katherine Shaw remarried at some point. Maybe multiple times. I’m sure you can pull up the official records once you’re back in Maryland.”

  “Some of them, maybe.”

  I fill her in on what I learned from Katherine’s diary, toning down the more violent aspects, since I really don’t want to upset her. She gives a baffled laugh.

  “So, you think my great-grandmother was conceived in 2305?”

  “Yes. In the very first few hours of that year, if Katherine’s suspicions were correct—she said something about a New Year’s Eve party. That’s the last bit of information though. I’m hoping I’ll learn more from Kate’s diary once I dig in a bit.”

  “Speaking of digging in,” Nora says, “your oatmeal is probably cold by now. Do you want me to reheat it?”

  It’s definitely lukewarm, but I tell her it’s fine, and we both focus on our breakfasts. The photos of Thea and Prudence remain on the wall screen, however, reminding me that I definitely need to call my mother or, more likely, pay her another visit soon. And not just to ask about Thea, Prudence, and the Cyrists, but to ask for a copy of the medical report from my father’s death. I’ve never seen it, so I have no clue whether his death could have been forestalled. I’m not at all certain what I’ll do if I find out that he could have been saved, but if it wasn’t something preventable, then I can put it out of my mind entirely.

  My grandmother is watching me when I look up from my breakfast. “You’re still thinking about it, aren’t you?”

  “Thinking about what?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Stop it. If you need to use that medallion in order to ensure your future, that’s one thing, although even that worries me. It’s a bit of a slippery slope, just like when they started the genetic enhancements. A little change here. A little change there. You never know how those little changes are going to interact when you put them all together. It’s very easy for the whole thing to snowball. But using that device to purposefully change something that has already happened? That’s playing with fire.”

  “I told you before that I’m not planning to do anything stupid.”

  Nora holds my gaze for several seconds, and then nods. “Okay, then. I guess I don’t have any choice other than to trust you.”

  Which means that she doesn’t entirely trust me.

  And that’s fair enough. I don’t entirely trust myself.

  I’d planned to jump straight home after breakfast, but instead I slip back into the bedroom and pull on the 1930s dress. There’s really no reason for me to blink back to Saint Peter’s Church in 1957. It’s more that I’m curious, and I need a diversion. Something to take my mind off that niggling temptation to just get it over with, to simply jump back to January of last year and tell an earlier version of myself to get my father to a cardiologist.

  A tourist trip with the key is a lousy consolation prize, but it’s better than nothing. So, after telling Nora goodbye, I set the key for July 6, 1957. The information I found in my search said that the parade began at two p.m. and the festivities at three. I scroll to two thirty, when everyone’s attention should be on the parade, and blink in.

  MADI

  NEAR LIVERPOOL, UK

  JULY 6, 1957

  The thorn at the tip of the damn leaf scrapes my cheek again, right below my eye, exactly as it did the last time I used this stable point for 1957. I reach out and snap the leaf off. Whoever set this point must have been taller than I am. The leaf isn’t the kind of thing that would be especially annoying at my neck or chest, but it’s a little disconcerting that close to my eye. The person who programmed the stable point clearly failed to consider the fact that shrubbery grows over time and gardeners aren’t always vigilant about trimming back the greenery, especially on the side that faces the building.

  While I doubt I’ll use this loca
tion again, my job in this business we’re starting will apparently be to vouch for the safety and accuracy of these stable points. I haven’t figured out how to edit or delete them yet, so I simply take two steps back and make a new entry. Maybe I’ll leave both and make a note that this new trolley stop is for short people who don’t want their eyes poked by pointy leaves.

  The afternoon sky is clear, with just a few puffy clouds, and the air is filled with scents of popcorn, sugar, and automobile exhaust. Off in the distance, I hear music that sounds vaguely like a marching band. I hope the musicians are children still learning to play, because they’re bad. Really bad.

  I stay back a bit, not wanting to be too conspicuous as I approach the crowd gathered along the sidewalk to watch the slow procession of flatbed trucks. Some of the trucks are festooned with colored paper and other decorations, and most have a group of young people sitting on the back, holding signs with the name of a club, school, or church, dutifully waving at the crowd. Farther down the way, a cluster of kids runs along the sidewalk, keeping pace with the parade. One of the boys is wearing a weird hat that looks like an animal hide, with a striped tail hanging down the back.

  The sound of the marching band tapers off as the musicians reach the end of the parade route, concluding with a few off-tune squawks. Over the engine noise I hear more music coming from a few trucks back. There’s an opening in the crowd, so I move up to the curb as the truck approaches, hoping to catch a glimpse. Six teenage boys with musical instruments—guitars and a drum set—are standing or sitting in kitchen chairs on the open back of the truck. On each side, there’s a rope with red and white triangular flags dangling down. The rope stretches diagonally from the top of the truck cab to the rear bumper. Like all of the parade floats, it doesn’t really look safe.

  I recognize one of the two guys sitting with his back against the cab as John Lennon, one of the two Beatles here today. The other guy, Paul McCartney, apparently shows up later. Lennon is dressed in a plaid shirt, and he and one of the other guys are playing guitar. I wouldn’t really call it a performance. It’s more like friends goofing around with some random chords as they near the end of the parade route.