“Yeah. I hate these cuck-making bitches.”
They wandered away, their insults growing fainter as the street swallowed them.
“Did he say ‘cock-making bitches’? Or … ‘duck-making’? What is that? I need to know for my research into neologisms of the asshole class.” Lizzy gave me a quizzical scientist look that used to crack me up. Now it made me tired.
“I can’t be your friend anymore.” Saying it out loud made it real at last. More real than months of pretend politeness. “I’m going to take the bus home.”
“Beth, you can’t take the bus. At least let me drive you.”
“I don’t ever want to get inside your car again.”
I didn’t care what she would say next. I didn’t want to see the expression on her face. I walked into the street and aimed myself in the exact opposite direction from the one Elliot and his friends had taken.
* * *
I wasn’t actually sure how I would take the bus home, but my mood was so big that I didn’t feel pragmatic about my situation for about five blocks. I was in a residential neighborhood with no bus stops, and I was starting to see a lot more chain link fences. Probably not a great place to be walking alone at midnight. Maybe I could use the pay phone at Starless to call a cab. I had my mom’s emergency credit card, and it’s not like I could possibly get in more trouble tonight anyway.
“Beth!” The voice came from behind me. Great. Now I was going to have another argument with Lizzy.
But when I turned around, it was Tess, in the Gunne Sax outfit she wore when I first met her. It knocked the wind out of me. “What the hell! Where did you come from?”
Before I could splutter anything else, she crushed me in a hug. “Oh my god, Beth, it’s you! You’re alive! Oh my god.” Her voice wavered and she pulled away awkwardly.
My stomach churned. Her face was so familiar, like her voice. As familiar as my own. But something had always been off.
“Why wouldn’t I be alive? You’re alive. I couldn’t possibly be dead if you are alive.” My voice sounded a lot more reasonable than I felt.
“Right, right.” Tess looked down, hair falling across her cheek. “Yeah, right.”
With a sense of dread, I realized that I already knew what was wrong. The times I’d met her before, it had been dark or I’d been so weirded out that I wasn’t thinking straight. Now I could see her clearly.
“Tess. You’re not me, are you?” I took in her skinny shoulders, and the way she flipped her hair to the side, briefly creating a mohawk-like shape over her forehead. “You’re Lizzy.”
When she met my eyes, it was the same expression she’d worn at the railroad tracks. Hours ago. Decades ago. I raised my hand to smack her but made a fist instead, bringing it down hard against my own thigh. “Why did you lie to me?”
“I’m sorry, Beth, I’m so sorry.” When she started to half cry as she talked, I couldn’t believe I’d ever mistaken her for anyone but Lizzy. She swallowed hard and composed herself. “I knew you wouldn’t listen to me. I was a bad person. Maybe evil. You taught me that. I wanted to get you away from me, before … before…”
“Before what?” It was louder than I’d ever yelled.
She whipped her head around, looking at the darkened houses. “Let’s talk somewhere private. I can drive you home.”
“You just literally tried to drive me home and I said no.”
Tess put a hand to her forehead and winced. “Yeah. I know. I mean, I am starting to remember. Fuck, it hurts. Please let me drive you.”
Something about her tone was suddenly so unlike Lizzy’s that I was jolted. She’d traveled through time to find me, more than once. This really might be more serious than murder. “Okay,” I conceded. “Where’s your car?”
When we slid into the seats, Tess gulped some aspirin and took a winding route to the freeway. She didn’t say anything until we were on the I-5, heading south. I vacillated between rage and numbness, rewinding our previous conversations in my mind with different players in the roles. So it was Lizzy who had become the traveler, not me. I still didn’t know what I would become. It was a relief to know my future was uncharted, and I didn’t have to wonder anymore what would turn me into the kind of person who liked the name Tess.
Finally Tess glanced over, then back at the road. “I can’t talk to you about your future, but there aren’t any rules against telling people about their alternate present.” She sighed. “Look—I came back here because I remember a timeline where you killed yourself, Beth. Right before we went to college. You jumped off that bridge in Pasadena where we used to hang out. You know the Colorado Street bridge? We were standing there smoking and then you were gone. I couldn’t stop you, and it … it destroyed me.” She looked over again and I could see tears on her face. “I don’t know if you can understand because you’re not that person anymore. But I never killed anyone else after you … after that. My whole career has been about changing history without violence. It’s been hard. I still have the same urges. You’re one of the only people on Earth who knows what I’m struggling with.”
I wasn’t sure that was true, but it was my chance to ask something I’d been wanting to know for months. “Lizzy, why did you keep killing those guys? I mean, I understood when it was with Scott, but after that … what happened to you?”
I could see more tears making reflective tracks down her face, but she kept her eyes on the scatterplot of taillights ahead. “That first time was so easy. It felt—I don’t know. Like we’d really fixed something. Made a difference. But also it felt good. Natural.” She paused, thinking. “Remember that documentary we watched—jeez, I guess it was last summer for you. It was about how female lions hunt their prey, and we kept joking about how great our faces would look bathed in blood like that one lion who had fucking dipped her whole head inside an antelope’s guts? It was like that. Magnificent and honorable. But also … natural? Because we were doing it to protect all the baby lions and the big fluffy male lions who just wanted to sit under trees and look pretty. I don’t know if that makes sense.”
I shook my head. “I remember the documentary, yeah. But we aren’t lions, Lizzy. We’re people. We don’t need to eat rapists and creeps to survive.”
She snorted a soft laugh, sounding exactly like the pre-murder Lizzy I had lost. “Beth, I’m so glad to talk to you again. I am so glad you are alive and in the world.”
Lizzy’s lion story had momentarily diverted my attention from that alternate self, the one who committed suicide. Had Lizzy and I become best friends because we shared the urge to kill? Maybe we’d turned that urge in different directions, but it was still there, a fucked-up substrate to our love. Then the murders heightened everything. Each death took her closer to some kind of predatory ecstasy. But they took me deeper into the place my father wanted to lead me, where the solution to everything was a pure, self-destructive rage.
Still, my agony had eased after that day when Tess and I talked about what my dad had done when I was younger. That pulled me up short. How did she know that? Had my other self told Lizzy my secret?
“How did you know what happened with my dad? You said you knew what he did that one night.”
“Beth, your dad was mentally ill. He did a million terrible things to you. I knew that.” She touched my shoulder in the gentlest way possible and my eyes felt hot. “Yes, I was a shitty friend, but I wasn’t shitty in that way. I care a lot about you. I knew you didn’t want to talk about it, but I also knew it was … bad.”
“So … you know the thing that happened?”
“Which thing are you talking about? The time he made you shower twice before dinner because he thought you were too sweaty to be inside the house? The time he freaked out because we had our shoes on? The time he put you on restriction for three months because you got an A-minus in typing class? All the times he pretended he wasn’t your dad when he took us to the movies?”
My face hurt. “No. Not those times.”
“Oka
y. I guess I don’t know, then.”
“Do you think you really changed the timeline forever? What if I kill myself next year?” I was fearful in a way I had never been before. It was mixed with self-consciousness and melancholy and something else I couldn’t name.
Tess was silent for a long time. “It’s true you could do that. I always thought that if you didn’t have to see the murders…”
“I saw the murders.”
“No. You saw some of them. Not the worst ones.”
My body was thrumming with the uncanniness of everything. “You didn’t have to lie to me, you know. You could have said who you are. I would have believed you. Why are you always lying?”
“That wasn’t—I’m not. No. I had to say I was you because then you would know for sure you were going to survive. I wanted you to think suicide was not an option. I wanted to give you hope.”
“You always thought lying was easier than telling the truth.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Now you’re lying again.”
I stared at her profile, illuminated by a chaos of freeway lights, and willed her to say something else. But she wouldn’t. That’s one way she’d changed. Lizzy would have argued with me for weeks about her innocence, and how she was totally not lying and never would lie to me. Tess knew when to shut up.
TWENTY-FIVE
TESS
Raqmu, Nabataean Kingdom (13 B.C.E.) … Raqmu, Ottoman-occupied territory (1893 C.E.)
I couldn’t stay away from Beth, despite all my failures. After everyone settled down for bed in 13 B.C.E., I snuck out at midnight to bribe some tappers who could send me forward. With the Machine right here at Raqmu, and airline travel on the other side, I thought I could pull a move from The Geologists. I’d save Beth on the night of her suicide, then travel back to the Nabataean Kingdom for Soph’s sacrifice. This might be my last chance to travel upstream to 1993 from a time with spotty record-keeping. Getting back down might be dicey, but I could talk my way into it. The techs in the early nineties knew me now.
I’d psyched myself up for failure, or something more ambiguous. But I had no way to prepare for the mental onslaught of a merging conflict. When I slithered back out of the wormhole into the chamber at ancient Raqmu, it felt like I’d been vomited up by an ancient ocean. The saline smell was horrible, and I had the crunchy remains of a graptolite colony in my soaking-wet hair. Which meant I’d been dragged through the Ordovician again—graptolites were common plankton in that period, known for nesting together in tiny chitinous tubes made from their own secretions.
“Welcome back.” It was one of the slaves whom I’d bribed to send me through, a man with a deep voice and dark brown skin who spoke in Greek. It had been a week in travel time, but only a few minutes here. Bringing a hand to my face, I realized the catastrophic headache I’d had in 1993 was mostly gone. It was such a relief that I almost started crying again. Though my memory was blotchy, I could move without wincing. I stepped out of the circle and drifted into the shadowy atrium, wondering if I would ever reconcile the two histories vying for dominance in my mind.
Beth was dead. Beth was alive. I had finally changed my past.
On the street, I stared at the shuttered shops and tried to figure out who I was. I’d known exactly what I was doing right up until that moment when I hugged Beth and alien memories started to pour into me. It was like suddenly remembering a vivid dream, except it was an alternate version of my own life. Not completely alternate—I was still here, still on the same mission for the Daughters. I was a traveler, teaching at UCLA. But there was a violent sense of emotional dislocation. Especially when I tried to remember what had happened during my undergraduate years at college, when Beth was there and not there at the same time. Or maybe it was more like she wasn’t there in two different ways. And the new way was so much more painful than the old one had been. How could her survival hurt more than her death?
I wove between stone houses, slowly finding my way to the rooms we’d rented at an inn. A sleepy goat crashed into my knees and I tripped on the offerings at a shrine outside somebody’s family tomb. The moonlight was blinding.
When I slipped back into bed, I was shaking with exhaustion. I wedged myself into the cot next to Soph and fell asleep instantly.
* * *
“Wake up, Tess! It’s almost midday.” Anita stood over me, brandishing three scrolls and a small basket of grain. “I’ve got everything we need for tonight.”
My anxiety latched on to a new target as I remembered our plans for Soph’s sacrifice to al-Lat. “What is all that?”
“Some background material and an offering.”
“Isn’t Soph our offering?”
“I hope so, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to bring a little extra. Every goddess likes some grain, right?”
I had to laugh. “I don’t know about goddesses, but I’m a huge fan of grain.” The headache twisting in my sinuses had ebbed away completely. As long as I focused on my recent history, this mission, my mind was relatively clear. But I still felt unlike myself in a way I couldn’t yet quantify.
* * *
During her studies at Raqmu, Soph had written about the goddess al-Lat. Here in the Nabataean Kingdom, she was a multipurpose deity associated with fertility and change. In other times and places, people worshipped her attributes under names like Mefitis, Isis, Venus, Kali, and Madonna. But Anita and I knew something about al-Lat that Soph didn’t. Here in ancient Raqmu, her temple offered protection to the Timeless who were not men—people like Soph, refugees from a moment when they faced death or extreme persecution. In other temporal localities, Soph might have gone to a convent or a women’s shelter. In this one, she had another choice.
Thanks to an unusual loophole in Nabataean law, religious orders could receive gold from the city-state for sacrifices. As long as a refugee claimed to be a “sacrifice,” the Temple of al-Lat had coin to spend on their food and clothing. It helped that the city’s rich women put huge annual donations into Raqmu’s coffers to support this practice. Also, since the “sacrifice” was technically dead, she couldn’t be arrested for traveling without a mark. It was the roundabout and slightly underhanded way that the city made itself a sanctuary.
That evening, Anita led Soph, C.L., Morehshin, and me to an older part of town reached by a long set of stairs curving up the canyon walls. We ascended to the second level of the city here, with houses and shops cut deep into the sandstone along a wide promenade. The Temple of al-Lat was set back from the walkway, behind a garden of fruit and nut trees fed from an elaborate network of cisterns, pools, and pipes.
“This is beautiful.” Soph’s face was radiant. She’d been reading the scrolls with Morehshin and memorizing the ceremony to join the ranks of al-Lat’s protected Timeless. I looked at her sidelong, taking in the kohl-smeared eyes, braided hair, and pale linen robe Anita had dug up somewhere in the AGU quarters. When I first met Soph, I thought she was a sex radical using the language of Spiritualism to spread the cause. Now I knew she was a believer, too. Maybe not a conventional one, but close enough that the Temple of al-Lat meant something more than political asylum to her.
Soph smiled at me and I took her hand.
We entered the temple through an atrium with high windows that brought in sunlight across a brightly painted ceiling. Benches lined a central pool, and people crowded onto all of them, talking and gesturing and eating dinner and staring off into space. Anita introduced us to a dark-skinned woman named Esther, who wore a dress laced up over a loose white blouse that looked vaguely fifteenth century. Her fingertips were dyed with shimmering green ink and she tucked a wooden writing kit under her arm before gesturing us down a long, lamplit corridor. The air cooled as we got further into the rock.
After a minute of walking, we made a sharp left and emerged into a palatial room whose walls were covered in wooden shelves of scrolls, mechanical instruments, and jars. A fifty-foot statue of al-Lat rose from the floor to tower over the center
of the room, her three faces seeing into every corner. Beyond her skirts, at the far end of the room, a dais was backed by several rows of semicircular stadium seats cut into the high walls. Fresh air came in through portals in the arched ceiling. Dusty beams of sunlight shot through them to a floor mosaic of astronomical charts.
“Welcome, women and new genders.” Esther addressed us in modern English with an accent I didn’t recognize. “The ceremony will take place in the amphitheater.” She gestured at the dais, where a very bored-looking teenager was setting out some candles and our offering of grain.
“Should we go over there and wait?” I’d read a lot about the Temple of al-Lat, but had never actually visited. From my research, though, I had been anticipating something with a little more ritual to it. Everybody’s nonchalance made it seem like Soph was getting a library card rather than temporal amnesty from a cosmic mother goddess.
Esther ignored my question and knocked on a polished wooden door. “Your sacrifice is here, ma’am!”
A woman whose black hair was wound into tightly coiled ringlets emerged from behind the door, wrapping a blue shawl over the deep brown of her shoulders. “I’m Hugayr. These are my students, but you can ignore them. They’ll be observing.” She spoke in crisp Nabataean, though she obviously understood English, too. Following her were three women with writing kits like Esther’s, all wearing identical harried expressions. We trailed Hugayr to the amphitheater, where the teenager lit candles and joined a few other women on the benches. Everything smelled pleasantly of beeswax.
Hugayr pulled three carved stones from her robes and set them on the dais. Each had been cut to resemble a flower and emitted a blue glow, as if infinitesimal LEDs were embedded in its crystal matrices. “There will probably be a crowd of students here,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. We only get a couple of sacrifices every year, so it’s a great chance for them to get some experience.”
The Future of Another Timeline Page 23