The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz

  Frozen with rage and helplessness, I watched them march past. Soph smiled. “Tell Aseel. She knows what to do. Please don’t worry, Tess.”

  “We’ll get you out of this, Soph.” I made my voice firm.

  As soon as they were gone, anxiety fizzed in the pit of my stomach. Despite having warned Soph about this exact possibility, I hadn’t been prepared to watch her seized and harassed. This wasn’t part of our plan.

  Morehshin padded back through our door, and hunkered down on the pile of rugs and pillows she used as a bed. “They are going to kill her.”

  “No, they aren’t. No. No, that’s not how it’s done here. We’ll get a lawyer tomorrow. That’s what we’ll do. First thing.” My words came out in a quavering rush.

  “A lawyer.” She echoed the word like she didn’t know what it meant; or maybe she did, and was exceptionally dubious.

  * * *

  At Aseel’s request, Sol found us a young First Amendment zealot to take the case pro bono. Sitting in the gloom of his office, the lawyer told us exactly what I’d feared.

  Comstock had men tracking all pamphlets coming to New York from Chicago. His men had seized several of Soph’s newsletters, including one about how angels had given us rubbers because sex is more spiritually fulfilling when there is no fear of pregnancy. When information about birth control crossed state lines, it became a federal matter under Comstock’s jurisdiction at the post office. The lawyer was excited about defeating censorship, but he didn’t seem to care much about getting Soph out of jail. Meanwhile, Soph’s friends in the press obligingly turned her story into shocking headlines:

  COMSTOCK ARRESTS LOCAL WOMAN OVER NASTY BOOKS!

  WHY IS COMSTOCK PUTTING THIS POOR WOMAN IN CHAINS?

  Then the lawyer gave a few interviews, and the evening papers were all about him:

  COMSTOCK CALLS IT FILTH, BUT THIS CHICAGO LAWYER CALLS IT FREE SPEECH!

  ATTORNEY PROMISES “FIGHT TO THE FINISH” AGAINST COMSTOCK!

  We were back at his office the next morning, asking when Soph would be out on bail. He leaned back in his chair, slicked his hair down, and regarded us with an expression of extreme satisfaction. “Ladies, this case is going pretty well. Did you read the papers?” He gestured at one, with his name prominently featured. “But I won’t lie to you. It isn’t going to be easy for your friend. They’ve taken her to Cook County Asylum. Because she’s hysterical, you know. A nymphomaniac.”

  I stared at Soph’s lawyer, wondering why he’d taken this case if he believed that Victorian garbage about how women with an interest in sex were deranged. Cook County Asylum was a bug-infested hell south of the city in Dunning, notorious for abuse.

  “We have to get her out of there.”

  “That would be ideal, but this diagnosis means she’s totally inaccessible during the first few days of her treatment.” The lawyer made a sweeping gesture. “I have other cases to attend to, so check back with me next week.”

  He put us off another week, and then another. Finally, Morehshin camped out in front of the lawyer’s office until he got the idea that his client’s well-being might be as important as constitutional law.

  It took us over a month to get her out of the asylum.

  * * *

  The day Morehshin brought Soph back to the village, there was a particularly rancid smell hanging over the city. Slaughterhouse runoff was rotting in the sewer system, and it wouldn’t wash out until the next big rain. Soph’s usually sunny face was chalky, and her hands trembled when she reached out to embrace us in the tea house beside the Algerian Theater.

  “My darling!” Aseel was stricken. “What did they do to you?”

  Morehshin gave us a grim look. “You know what they do at that place.”

  “I believe I saw … true darkness.” Soph spoke in a gravelly whisper, as if her throat was raw from screaming or sickness or worse.

  I ordered drinks. The chairs were uncomfortable metal monstrosities, and the table was a piece of rickety carnival trash, but the mint tea was superb. Our waiter made a big show of pouring it from a great height into tiny, curved glasses, the steam making a soothing puff around our faces. We all sipped quietly for a minute.

  “I can’t go back there.” Soph’s voice was stronger now. “I know our fight goes beyond my puny life, and that there are women counting on us in the future.” She grabbed Morehshin’s hand. “But I would rather die than endure that … evil.” Her eyes filled with tears and she shook her head over and over, repeating the twitchy motion until Aseel touched her cheek and murmured reassuringly.

  “You’re safe now. That lawyer says they can’t put you back there unless you’re convicted.”

  “Now I know why Penny took her life.” Soph dipped a finger into her teacup and drew a pentagram on the table with the cooling liquid. “There are things worse than death. So … many … things.”

  I had seen Soph ecstatic and spellbinding and drunk and enraged. But I had never seen her like this. Terror distorted her posture, as if her whole being were focused on some amorphous danger. The problem was that nothing in the coming months was going to unburden her. The threat of further imprisonment was very real. As I watched her stumble through a conversation with Aseel and Morehshin, it occurred to me that the asylum had eroded her entire sense of self. She couldn’t thrive on the cold ideological isolation that kept Emma Goldman sane in prison. Her strength came from rituals that exalted love and community. Soph was not going to survive this battle if we waged it here, on these terms.

  I tasted bile in my mouth. This war—this long fucking arc of history—had destroyed too many good women and erased the evidence. Nobody would remember Penny or Berenice or Aseel or Soph, but Comstock’s laws would last over a century. That self-satisfied lawyer who called Soph a nympho would have a civil liberties hagiography on Wikipedia. A memory invaded me, of watching a woman’s body fall from a great height, crashing into death before she had a chance to live. It happened so fast I didn’t have time to scream her name. All my heartbroken recklessness emanated from that moment, that person, that suicide I tried every day to forget. There were some things I couldn’t set right, but there were some things I could.

  “Soph, we need to get you away from here. You spent years at Raqmu studying the ancient Nabataean texts about women’s spirituality, right?”

  Looking up from the table, her eyes still red, Soph allowed herself a tiny smile of pride. “Of course.”

  “And exactly how many years were you there?”

  “Almost six.”

  Flooded with relief, I looked at Morehshin. She was nodding slowly. Without intending to, Soph had already served her Long Four Years.

  Soph continued. “I can speak a little Nabataean too, though I guess it’s ridiculous to say that one speaks a dead tongue.”

  “It’s not dead. Not where we’re going. There’s a safe harbor about two thousand years ago in the Nabataean Kingdom—it’s a place where the Comstockers can’t go.”

  Soph’s eyes widened, and she burst into tears again. But this time, it wasn’t a jagged, hopeless noise. It sounded like she was wringing demons out of her body. She warded off their return with the salt that ran through her fingers and down the fresh burn scars on her arms.

  * * *

  Aseel used her considerable powers of organization to get us the hell off the continent as covertly as possible. Sol had friends in shipping, and he was willing to do us one more favor—especially since Aseel had agreed to manage his sheet music business after the Midway shut down in late October. We would take the train to New York, travel by steamer to Lisbon, and from there catch another ship to Tel Aviv. There was a newly constructed train route that took us east from Tel Aviv into the Ottoman-occupied territories surrounding Raqmu, known in my present as Jordan.

  Raqmu was a thriving city of scientists, travelers, operatives, and spies. Home to the first Machine discovered in recorded history, its towering stone monuments dated back at least four thousand years. Shadowe
d by mountains and surrounded by high, rocky cliffs the color of rose gold, the city was shielded from attack but open to countless nourishing streams of fresh mountain water.

  Centuries of human engineering guided that water from a wild rush down foothills into an elaborate system of canals, waterfalls, and pools that fed the city’s gardens and growing populace. Architecture here had evolved to suit the soft sandstone of valley walls, with buildings burrowed into the rock to form vast cave palaces. Building facades were grand edifices sculpted directly into the stone. Generations of workers had cut a second level of streets and sidewalks above the basin floor, reached by stairs that wound between jagged outcroppings. As a result, the city grid appeared to be filling the basin and sloshing up its sides.

  There was only one way to enter this marvel of art and engineering, and that was through a narrow passage called al-Siq that wound between smooth, curving cliffs studded by sentry towers. No invading army had ever made it through.

  We hired a porter at the train station to carry our tiny collection of bags into the city. As we passed through al-Siq, slices of sun illuminated the elaborately carved doorways, windows, and facades that marked the entrances to archive caves, old and new. Some were humble and neglected, while others were hung with flags and guarded by gunmen. These places were full of forbidden histories, official documents, state secrets, and untranslated assertions in languages no one remembered. Some held controversial memoirs from famous travelers, reporting highly divergent timelines whose dark arcs we’d narrowly escaped. Others were packed with ephemera like two-thousand-year-old receipts for grain and slaves, or board games from the seventeenth century.

  Ancient manuscripts in Nabataean described how the city’s first settlers dug shelters into the natural rock walls surrounding their hidden village—and discovered that any symbols recorded inside remained intact, no matter how much history changed.

  Wind whistled past us, eroding al-Siq one microlayer at a time. Born from sediment swirling at the bottom of the Earth’s oceans, these sandstone walls dated back to the Ordovician period. Raqmu’s pink rock had first seen sunlight on the coast of a barren supercontinent drifting slowly across the South Pole. Though it was the first Machine discovered by humans, it was the youngest by far. It was also the only one that spawned archive caves. The four other Machines were millions of years older, embedded in rocks formed half a billion years ago during the Cambrian, when multicellular life first evolved. Raqmu’s uniqueness raised unanswerable questions. Was it a more sophisticated version of the other Machines? Had we inherited the work of engineers whose technology could capture and program wormholes? Were the Machines built by one of those early life forms, long extinct? Extraterrestrials? Or were they completely natural phenomena that we’d need another two millennia of geoscience research to understand?

  We found a pleasant room in the scholar’s quarter at an inn popular with English-speaking students. From our tiny window, we had a view of the ancient temple al-Khaznah, its elaborate columns emerging out of the rough rock like an architectural apparition. Beyond its facade was the Machine—and the civil servants who supported it. We were decades away from the founding of the Chronology Academy, so travelers at Raqmu dealt with an imperial bureaucracy full of ministers, military officers, and priests.

  After settling in, we distracted ourselves with a walk around the neighborhood to find dinner. It was early evening, and Raqmu’s vertical streets teemed with people from all times and places. The high, embellished cliffs halved the sunset light, filling the canyon floor with purple dusk while minarets glowed orange over our heads. Students smoked and drank sweet, dark coffee at café tables dotting the sidewalks, while harried bureaucrats hopped on squealing cable cars that would take them to the suburbs. Temporal locals in their suits and robes moved through a crowd dressed in polychronological mashups of rayon, linen, hemp, and uncanny textiles that probably only a multi-tool could make. Without a doubt, Raqmu was the most chronopolitan place in the world, and it was one of the few cities where I felt at home. Here, no one ever pretended history was fixed. How could you, when the archive caves were everywhere, testifying to the existence of edits merged into and out of the timeline?

  Over a meal of fragrant lamb and vegetables, Soph pressed me for more information about the archive caves. “Can we not simply figure out where this timeline went wrong by studying what other travelers have left there? We could discern the differences, and undo them.”

  “Maybe everything left in the caves is a lie.” Morehshin grunted the words around a cigar. “Propaganda from another timeline.” She’d taken up smoking and meat, but still wouldn’t touch coffee.

  I shot her a look. “I don’t think it’s as grim as that. Obviously what people say about their own timeline is biased. History is full of exaggeration and misrepresentation. But Soph, I never would have known to visit the Algerian Village without the caves. There is a lot of evidence that Comstock is at the center of heavy revision, especially after the Columbian Expo.”

  Morehshin tapped ash into the cobblestone street. “The archive caves are also how I found Tess. Comstockers appear in many timelines. So does Harriet Tubman.”

  “The Daughters of Harriet.” Soph breathed the name as if invoking a supernatural power. Then she turned to Morehshin. “Do the Daughters exist in your present time, too?”

  “No. That is why I came back to find them.”

  “But Harriet Tubman is part of your timeline?”

  Morehshin was bemused. “We are all in the same timeline. There is only one.”

  “But you two are always talking about many timelines. And that Comstocker, Elliot—he said he remembered a world where women didn’t get the vote. Where are all those other timelines?”

  “They are … potentials. Discarded versions. Unseen by the narrative force.” Morehshin’s powers of translation were failing her.

  I tried to explain. “In a way, there are many timelines. But only one exists in our universe. The others are possibilities. Every time we change history, it’s as if we pull a segment from one of those other timelines into our own. The more we edit, the more our timeline becomes a patchwork. That’s why travelers remember so many different timelines. Each of us recalls the timeline before we made our changes. Every traveler has a slightly different patchwork in our memories.”

  “Sometimes very different,” Morehshin said.

  “Rarely.” I was firm. “Some people still believe the timeline can’t be changed at all.”

  Soph widened her eyes. “But there’s so much evidence … all your memories.”

  I thought about conferences where senior faculty denied the existence of a timeline where abortion was legal. It was our word against theirs, and they had tenure. “Soph, it’s … very hard to prove scientifically that something happened in a previous edit of the timeline. Even if there’s evidence in the archive caves. Like Morehshin said, it could all be lies. Some people believe that travelers like us invent fake memories to undermine the current version of history. That’s why we have to believe each other.”

  Morehshin nodded. “What I read by Anita in the subalterns’ cave was true.”

  Soph stared into the distance, where birds scooped scraps out of a fountain with awkward grace. “Have you ever wondered whether there might be multiple timelines that are real? Maybe each time you change history, you’re diverging into a new timeline and leaving your sisters behind in the old one, where they have to … to fend for themselves. Alone.” Her eyes flashed with anguish. “After all, a universe and a multiverse look the same from where we’re standing.”

  I put my arm around her reassuringly. “There is only one timeline. Geoscientists have ways of expressing it mathematically, but another way of putting it is that the Machines are like … threads. They sew swatches together into a single quilt.”

  Morehshin said nothing. She was staring morosely at something in the cobblestones below her feet, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out wha
t it was.

  TWENTY-ONE

  BETH

  Irvine, Alta California (1993 C.E.)

  I knew it was going to happen eventually. I came downstairs to dinner barefoot, and my father reached up from his chair to grab my arm so hard I gasped.

  “Get back upstairs and put your shoes on! We always wear shoes downstairs!”

  It was useless to protest. Still, I couldn’t help looking over at my mother—I was always hoping that one day she’d notice that something seriously weird was going on. She was reading a book about intersectional education and completely ignored us. As my father glared, I wondered if anyone but me would ever question the blissful domesticity of this scene. I could smell something peppery cooking on the stove, and the table was set. Early evening sunlight tumbled through the orange tree in our backyard, and a cat walked furtively across the cinderblock fence that divided our property from our neighbors’. Everything was relentlessly normal, right down to the hum of the air conditioner.

  Maybe I was crazy to think anything was wrong. But my arm stung and my dad was pretending that we had always worn shoes downstairs and I couldn’t believe that my mom didn’t know or care. I thought of saying something casual to her, like, “Remember how yesterday dad said our shoes would contaminate the rug?” Then I thought about screaming until every piece of glass in the kitchen was reduced to shards.

  I stood for a few seconds longer, wishing she would at least look up and acknowledge me. Nothing. Either she was genuinely engrossed in her book, or she didn’t want to deal. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

  “Well? Where are your goddamn shoes, Beth?” My father crossed his arms.

  I walked to the foyer and grabbed my sandals. But then I didn’t feel like stopping. Without thinking, I opened the door and left the house. I walked quickly out of our cul-de-sac, rounding a corner onto the path that led to the community pool several blocks away. I wanted to be long gone by the time my parents realized I’d left. It’s not that I hadn’t broken rules before, but usually I was secretive about it. I never openly left the house without their permission. Especially not when my father had just yelled at me.