The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz

  “Let’s do something tonight. Want to go to the movies?”

  Of course I did. It was our default plan every Friday. “Let’s go to my house and we can call Heather and Soojin.”

  Lizzy nodded and crushed the cigarette butt under a rock. We scrambled over the wall, wedging our boots into the crumbling mortar between bricks, and landed on some greenbelt next to the community pool. A few kids were splashing around with their mothers, who gave us dirty looks. Punk girls being disobedient. At least they noticed.

  My house formed one end of a rectangular block of condominiums built with shared walls, like the suburban architectural equivalent of conjoined quintuplets. Each facade faced the quiet street with the same lopsided face, three windows and a door, painted in matching shades of 1970s tan. But the corner houses, like mine, had one extra window on the side wall that faced the street. My father called it “the deluxe model,” but he didn’t seem to enjoy it much. We had a strict rule in the house that the curtains always had to be drawn, unless it was raining, in which case they had to be open to let in extra light.

  Actually, we had a lot of complicated rules, and they changed depending on my father’s mood. It kept me vigilant. Coming home, I always felt like I was donning futuristic sensor gear for detecting minute shifts in ground elevation. My lasers swept the area, bouncing off every surface, light receptors primed to detect any change. I unlocked the front door. Had any temblors perturbed the landscape? No. My parents weren’t home.

  We went upstairs to my room and I popped a tape into the boom box. I had already memorized most of the new Million Eyes EP, though it still felt kind of new in my head. Lizzy dialed Heather and Soojin to make movie plans while the band yowled: “REBEL GIRL YOU ARE THE QUEEN OF MY WORLD!”

  I cranked it up, but not loud enough that I wouldn’t hear the garage door opener announcing my father’s arrival in his classic VW with the fancy engine upgrade. Sometimes he picked my mom up after she taught her last class, but sometimes he headed straight home from the auto repair shop he’d inherited from my grandfather. When I heard a grinding squeal coming from outside, I turned the volume down and shut my bedroom door. I could feel my father’s rage seeping through the floor from downstairs. It usually took him a few hours to simmer down after work, especially at the end of the week.

  * * *

  Outside the sun was drowning in a Technicolor bruise of pollution, but inside we ate spaghetti and my mom made small talk.

  “How are your parents, Lizzy?” She was using her high school teacher voice on us, which meant she was paying attention. Usually at dinner she read the paper and ignored whatever lecture my father was delivering.

  “They’re good, Ms. Cohen. They just got back from a long trip.”

  “Oh, how nice! Where did they go?”

  Lizzy twirled her spaghetti deliberately. “Someplace in Jordan? It’s for work.”

  My father was completely silent until Lizzy got up to use the bathroom.

  “Why are you wearing shoes in the house?” He was whisper-raging. A couple of months ago, he’d gotten really focused on shoes. I’d come out of my bedroom with bare feet, and he’d ordered me never to set foot inside the house without shoes. Since then, I’d never taken them off unless I was getting in the shower or bed. Apparently, there’d been a reversal. I braced myself, sensors on alert.

  “We got the carpets cleaned last week. Why would you ever think that you should wear shoes in the house?” His voice had a poisonous edge that meant he was working his way toward a total meltdown. I stared at the ground, took my shoes off, and carried them to the foyer. Instant obedience and no questions were the best way to calm him down. I could intercept Lizzy on her way out of the bathroom and tell her to take hers off too. One of the many reasons I loved Lizzy was that she never cared when I asked her to do odd things, like suddenly take her shoes off in the middle of dinner. She accepted that we were taking our shoes off now, and then there would be more spaghetti.

  “What are you two doing tonight?” My mother continued the small talk when we returned in our socks.

  “We’re seeing a movie at the Balboa Theater with Heather and Soojin.”

  “There won’t be any boys with you, will there?”

  My father made a disgusted noise and nudged my mother’s elbow. “Delia, you do realize that if she were your son, you wouldn’t worry about girls being around. This is the 1990s. Everybody should be treated equally. So Beth is allowed to go out with boys.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at my father, and he smiled back. It was one of those days when his rule-changing mania flipped back around to reward me. Sometimes he decided that we were allies. I wished I knew why, but in my seventeen years on Earth I had yet to discover a predictable pattern.

  FIVE

  TESS

  Chicago, Illinois (1893 C.E.)

  In fall, I headed back to the late nineteenth century. Once the official paperwork was filed, all I had to do was grab an overnight bag and get to Flin Flon. We couldn’t send more than the clothes on our backs through the Machine with us, so it didn’t make sense for me to bring anything more. C.L. was fond of saying that theoretically we should be able to send anything through a wormhole. The only thing stopping us was an interface setting that geoscientists hadn’t figured out how to control with our tappers.

  I texted goodbye to the Daughters, and left myself a few notes in my office about some outstanding questions from students that I wanted to answer in my next lecture. Even if I traveled for a few years, I’d be back at work next week.

  One of the many things that drives me nuts about The Geologists, that BBC show about time travelers, is how the characters are always obsessing about period costumes. It seems like half the plots revolve around getting the right style of straw bonnet, or freaking out because somebody is wearing stockings that are made of non-period nylon. First of all, nobody pays that much attention to the small details of your underwear. And second, there are many ways to dress in every era. If I were to look like a proper nineteenth century lady from The Geologists, I’d blow my mission. I wasn’t trying to mingle with ladies. I needed New Women, those outrageous revolutionaries, college students, and artists who smoked cigarettes, read The Alarm, and supported Senator Tubman. To meet them, I wore a bicycling look of knickerbockers, thick knee socks, and a high-necked cotton blouse. A warm jacket fit snugly over the top, and I completed the outfit by tucking my long brown hair into a wool maritime cap. It was basically riot grrl style for the Gilded Age. And you’d be hard-pressed to find it in most history books, let alone a TV series.

  When I arrived in early April 1893, I had ice cold mud in my leather shoes. There was no bank of networked computers. An engineer was feeding coal to a single, steam-powered tapper connected to a massive turbine that dominated the mining camp’s wood plank warehouse. The room smelled like smoke and machine oil.

  I stood up unsteadily, taking in the rough walls, patched here and there with epoxy. Miners had stumbled on the Flin Flon Time Machine only fifteen years before, making it the most recently discovered of the five known Machines. That meant travelers who used Flin Flon to go back further than 1878 found themselves alone on a rocky outcropping next to a beautiful lake. No shack, no tappers, nothing. With training, a person could use stones to pound the Machine interface and return to their present. But I’d learned on tappers, so I generally used the Flin Flon machine only to explore the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To go further, I took the Machines at Raqmu and Attirampakkam, discovered thousands of years ago. Using those, you could go back pretty far and find bureaucrats from long-dead regimes to greet you—along with people trained in the art of tapping by hand. I’d never used the other two Machines, at the Super Pit in Kalgoorlie, Australia, and Timbuktu in Mali. Unless there was a compelling reason to be in those places, grants typically covered booking in only the closest Machines.

  Light came in from the doorway, and I could see my greeting committee now. A white man with an elaborate
ly waxed moustache and dusty overcoat doffed his hat as he entered. He spoke with a faint Quebecois accent.

  “When are you coming from?”

  I showed him my tattoo. “A few decades upstream: 2022.”

  “Welcome. How was the day up there?”

  “I came in fall, so it was pretty chilly.”

  He grinned and rubbed his chapped hands together. “Bet you’re glad to be here in the heat of spring! What’s your business?”

  “I’m a geoscientist from California, and I’m here to see the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.” That got him talking about the wonders that awaited me. Everybody in this period knew about the first American World’s Fair, known in the 1890s as the Columbian Exposition because it fell on the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus arriving in the Americas. We sat on a log outside, where it felt barely warmer than the month I’d left, and I tried vainly to scoop all the mud out of my shoes. I’d never come through wet before—the water vanished with the wormhole. I thought about the Comstockers’ plan to sabotage the Machines and hoped this wasn’t a sign that they were succeeding.

  Wax Moustache interrupted my thoughts. “So you’ll be needing a canoe down to Winnipeg to catch the train, I expect.”

  “Do you know anyone going down?”

  “Old Seacake is heading out pretty soon. He’s been trapping all the way up and I think he’s full up on beaver and mink. Good man. Mushkego tribe. He’ll get you there in a couple weeks, as long as you keep him away from whisky—you know how his kind like the fire water.” He winked, like he expected me to laugh at his racist joke. I frowned and pulled my shoes back on.

  “Do you know where Seacake is?” I knew a very limited amount of Cree, but I thought maybe the name “Seacake” was an extreme mispronunciation of a Cree word for skunk. Then again, maybe it was slang for hardtack, the long-lasting sailors’ crackers that white settlers brought to the bush.

  Seacake turned out to be a middle-aged guy with two thick braids and battered Levi’s jeans that would have been the envy of millennial hipsters up in ’22. He was packing his campsite into tidy canvas sacks.

  “Hey, Seacake, I got a traveler who needs to get to Winnipeg.”

  Seacake ignored Wax Moustache and looked at my knickerbockers. “You an anarchist?”

  I laughed. “No. I’m a geoscientist. And I like rational clothes.”

  He pondered for a minute and then nodded. “Okay. I’ll give you a ride if you strike camp and do the cooking.”

  That seemed like a good bargain, so we shook on it. Luckily, Seacake was heading out soon, and I was able to avoid Wax Moustache for the rest of my stay at camp.

  Most of the trip, Seacake rowed in silence. I burrowed into the furs and thought about my plan for an edit that would thwart the Comstockers. Ice clotted thickly at the edges of the water, and the canoe seemed to nose its way through sheets of melting sugar. It had been three days of dried meat and hardtack, and I watched the water hungrily.

  “You’re a traveler, huh?” Seacake cocked his head at me.

  “Yeah.”

  “From the future?”

  “I couldn’t be from the past. We can only travel backward from our present, not forward.”

  Seacake snorted. “Really? That’s what you think? White people really don’t know anything about time travel.”

  I sat up straighter. We knew the Cree used the Flin Flon Machine before white settlers claimed it, but very little information about their work survived. “Do you know people who can go forward in time?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.” Seacake’s tone was halfway between playful and annoyed. Was he messing with me?

  “Well, nobody in my time thinks it can be done. It’s one of the Machine’s hard limits.”

  Seacake shrugged. “Maybe the problem is that you think it’s a machine, and not an animal made of rock and water.”

  Despite the completely deadpan tone, I was pretty sure he was being sarcastic. I sighed. “So you’re really not going to tell me whether you can go to the future.”

  “Figure it out yourself.”

  “I’m sure somebody already has, somewhere in the timeline.”

  “Exactly.” Seacake finally cracked a grin. “Are there any good songs when you’re from?”

  I nodded, thinking about Grape Ape.

  “Can you sing one?”

  I was on a fur trapper’s canoe somewhere in northern Manitoba, hundreds of kilometers and decades from the world I knew. It seemed like the right time to sing a Grape Ape classic: “Racist Cops Suck My Plastic Dick.” For the next two minutes, the trees shivered with Glorious Garcia’s words, delivered in my off-key shriek.

  Seacake seemed to like it.

  When we finally got to Winnipeg, he gave me a couple of beaver pelts to sell for train tickets and a room with access to a bath. I thanked him profusely and he shrugged. “You can pay me back when you come through again.”

  The CP Line cut through tiny towns and thawing prairie farms, the varnished wood of its seats transducing our bumpy passage over the tracks into repeated jolts that I felt as one long ache in my lower back. In St. Paul, I spent a nickel on some cheese and hard candy before transferring to a U.S. line that would take me to Chicago via New York City.

  Traveling through time is easy, but getting to and from the damn Machine will kill you. Sometimes literally, if you meet a microbe our inoculations don’t cover. Thankfully I arrived at Union Station in downtown Chicago merely broke and hungry. The cold air brought gusts off Lake Michigan that smelled like rotting flesh and sewage. It wasn’t like I smelled much better. I’d been living on train station food for days, sleeping in a cramped berth, and my neck was a burning knot of pain. But I’d arrived at last, and the prospect of starting work had me excited. Straightening my jacket, I walked south along the putrid water to reach the geology department at the University of Chicago. Most big-city universities had a small fund set aside for traveler loans, and I needed a few dollars to tide me over until I had a job.

  Before I begged for university funds, though, I’d be passing through the Columbian Exposition. Opening day was months away, but the Expo was already packed with venues looking to hire. Ideally, I’d pick up a job before I ever got to the geology department. Travelers were trained to be participant observers, so I was supposed to earn a livelihood when I went downstream. At least the nineteenth century had an economic system I understood.

  I knew I was getting close when I saw domes and spires in the distance. I’d studied faded photographs of the Expo, but still got the familiar traveler’s rush when I saw it in person, rickety and real. Construction crews had spent the past year converting a swampy lakeside mess called Jackson Park into a maze of sprawling European-style buildings, artificial lagoons, and angel-encrusted facades. Today, in its half-finished state, the place looked like an insane fairy tale. Tourist brochures would call this area the White City, both for its color and for the way it embodied a spotless, shining Victorian futurism. I paused for a minute, marveling at the sheer size of the display halls, swarming with workers. Delivery wagons clattered past, piled with everything from live ostriches to bonsai trees. But this wasn’t where I wanted to land a job. I was looking for the Midway Plaisance, the long, dirty tongue of parkland that stuck out of the White City’s prettied-up face and deep into the city of Chicago itself. The Expo attractions there would inspire carnival sideshows for at least a century to come.

  I took a right turn and there it was: the Midway, its landscape rough and scarred by carriage wheels. I avoided puddles of liquefied manure and passed between exhibits that looked like villages jumbled together from various locations around the world: Java, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, Japan, Austria, Samoa, Egypt. Many of the concessions were still skeletal. Ahead of me loomed the monumental “Cairo Street” exhibit, a walled-in world of restaurants, shops, theaters, and bazaars that merged to form a colonial hallucination of various cities in the Maghreb. Men with hammers climbed all over Cairo Street’
s hulking “Luksor Temple.” Others were erecting two plinths covered in hieroglyphs for full pseudo-authenticity.

  This segment of the Midway was almost entirely blocked to traffic by a pile of enormous steel spokes, arranged like lumber in the mud-clogged street. They would eventually converge to form the world’s first Ferris wheel, a modern mega-machine designed to dwarf the minarets of North African architecture below. Dozens of workers were ripping up ground to lay the steam pipes that would power the thing. Across from Cairo Street were the Moorish Palace and Persian Theater, both little more than wooden foundations with a few rickety beams hinting at the large crowds they would hold in a few weeks. I couldn’t believe this place would soon become an American obsession.

  I poked my head around the corner from the Luksor and found a side street with one building whose slightly faded awnings gave it a lived-in appearance. Topped by gilded domes and covered in rows of bright tiles, it had a plain marquee that read “ALGERIAN THEATER.” In curly script below, the place promised to deliver “Moorish Kabils—Algerian Negre & Oulades Nai’le Dances.” Another sign helpfully elucidated: “Performance Every Hour! Dancing Girls!” A fountain stood outside, beautifully painted, full of murky rainwater. It sounded like people were drumming inside, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I was turning to leave when two women materialized in the shadows of the entrance. One was tall and pale, rolling a cigarette with tobacco she’d pulled from a tiny pouch hidden in her skirts. The other was short, her jet-black hair wound into braids around her brown face. She wore a man’s wool overcoat to cover her costume, visible only as a few metallic tassels against her thick black stockings.

  The tall one called out to me. “You here for the audition?”

  “No, I was just passing by.” I tried to sound casual. Like somebody who wasn’t desperate for a job.

  The one in the wool coat gave me an appraising look and grinned. “I like your knickerbockers. Want a smoke?”