“She’s right.”
When we knocked on Hugayr’s office door, one of her students opened it right away. Over her shoulder, I could see that Anita was already there, deep in conversation.
“Oh hello, come in!” Hugayr gestured us to some cushions around a small table made from bronze and wood. Then she glared at the student. “You—bring us some beer, and then get back to work on your manuscript. It’s showing some promise.”
The student hurtled out of the room, a tiny smile of accomplishment on their face, and returned with ceramic mugs of a foamy drink that smelled like barley and pepper. I sipped experimentally. Didn’t taste exactly like beer from my present, but close enough.
Hugayr put her mug down. “Tess, I have already told Anita. You can’t go home. It will kill you.”
I panicked, overwhelmed. “There’s nothing we can do?”
“We have other Timeless here who have experienced the same thing. When you edit your own life, it can be very painful. Not for everyone. Some people—they do an edit, get their loved one back, and live happily ever after. Some people feel only a little discomfort and then it goes away. But you are one of those unfortunate people who is completely fucked.”
“Why me? All I did was bring a loved one back, like you said.”
Hugayr wore a dubious expression. “Anita told me what you did. You created a highly divergent timeline. You edited your entire adult life all at once. Of course it made you sick. Didn’t you think about that before you did it?”
“Well, yeah … but it seemed like it was going okay until…”
“Until the edit actually took?”
I picked at a sliver of wood on the table leg. “I don’t get it. That was supposed to be a small change. But we made a huge change to women’s rights and abortion law, and nobody else is sick. Shouldn’t that have changed all our lives profoundly?”
“What is abortion?” Hugayr glanced at Soph for clarification.
“Ending a pregnancy.”
“I see. You changed some laws made by men. Yes. Did you change any women’s lives?”
“I guess … I changed Beth’s life.”
Anita scratched her head. “We changed Kitty’s life, I think.”
“Did either of those women’s lives change specifically because of what you did to men’s law?”
“They were two of the millions of women whose lives were changed. Reproductive rights improve our choices, give us freedom, allow us to follow new paths … it was a profound alteration of history.” I trailed off when Hugayr gave me the frown she usually reserved for students.
“Think. Why would you feel a big change less than a small one?”
I thought about all those people linking arms to protest Comstock at the Expo, the dancers at Sherry’s, Sol’s strategic carnival wisdom, and the Four Hundred on their thrones. “It was collective action. So many of us worked to change the laws that the effects are spread out and attenuated. I guess all of us feel it a tiny bit. But with Beth … that was something small I changed for myself alone.”
“When we say small things change, we do not mean that they are insignificant.”
I took a long swig of beer to drown the lump in my throat. “I guess I’m staying here, then.” The realization was bittersweet: I would miss the twenty-first century, but I felt at home here in ways I couldn’t entirely explain.
“My chambers are comfortable.” Soph touched my shoulder, and my heart skipped a beat. “You can stay with me for a while if you want.”
“You can be our next sacrifice!” Hugayr made it sound completely decided. She pulled out a scroll and flattened it in her lap. “Let’s figure out a job you could do as a member of the Timeless. How about … scribe? Gardener? Engineer? Assassin?”
“Wait, what? You have assassins?”
Hugayr looked concerned and showed Soph the scroll, written in Nabataean. “Did I translate that right?”
Soph squinted and made a seesaw wiggle with her hand. “You could perhaps say ‘killer’ or ‘defender’? But I think ‘assassin’ is probably the best word.”
I could still feel the weight of Elliot’s sword in my hands, and the way I’d known exactly how to sever his spine. Maybe that was why I belonged in the first century B.C.E. In Nabataean, there was a word for what I did best. There was actually a job that combined my skills as an academic and a murderer.
“I think I’d like to be an assassin.”
Hugayr smiled. “Great! We’ve really been needing one. Let’s schedule your sacrifice.”
HISTORICAL SOURCES:
A GUIDE
As you may have noticed, this book is an alternate history. But many of the events and people in it are based on ones that existed in our timeline. Here is a comprehensive list of facts and sources for anyone who wants to see how deep the wormhole goes.
The Ordovician period—which witnessed the biggest diversification of life on our planet—did end with a disaster that killed over 75 percent of all life on Earth. Two ice ages hit the planet in rapid succession (at least in geological time), turning those lush coastal ecosystems to ice. Nobody knows for sure how it happened, but physicist Adrian Melott and his colleagues have suggested a gamma ray burst (https://www.nature.com/news/2003/030922/full/news030922-7.html).
Before the United States took control of California, the state was part of the Las Californias province, divided into Alta California to the north and Baja California to the south. First it was owned by Spain, then by Mexico. After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, Alta California was claimed by the United States and became a state in the union in 1850. Baja California was claimed by Mexico.
Flin Flon is an actual city on the border between Manitoba and Saskatchewan. After discovering copper there, a prospector named the city after a character in a pulp sci-fi novel he was reading, The Sunless City by J.E. Preston Muddock.
Harriet Tubman was a Civil War hero, leader of the underground railroad, activist, and escaped slave who almost certainly would have been elected to the Senate had women been given the vote at the same time freed slaves were. But in our timeline, she had to petition the government to receive the same pension granted to any man who fought in the Civil War as she had. After the Civil War, she lived in New York, where she ran one of the nation’s first elder care homes for African Americans. You can learn more about her extraordinary life in historian Catherine Clinton’s biography, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.
The abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements—connected before the Civil War—were driven apart when women were not given the vote at the same time freedmen were. During Reconstruction, the Democratic Party emerged as a white nationalist alternative to Lincoln’s anti-slavery Republican Party. Republicans deliberately ran black candidates for office in the South to capture the votes of recently enfranchised freedmen. Eventually, the South went Democratic, and stayed that way until the mid-twentieth century. You can read more about the Democratic Party’s origin story in Bruce Bartlett’s Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past.
During the Haitian Revolution, a highly successful slave rebellion overthrew the French colonial government and left freed slaves and free people of color in charge of the nation. The French government insisted that Haiti pay steep reparations for “stealing” its slaves and plantations, thus destabilizing the burgeoning nation’s economy for decades to come. For more about this revolution, along with historical documents from the period, see Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804. Dubois has also written a popular history of the revolution called Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.
Anthony Comstock was appointed a “special agent” with the U.S. Postal Service, where his job was to open mail and hunt for obscene materials. He cemented his power by bringing a trunk full of nude postcards, novelty items, and rubber dildos that he had ordered through the mails to a congressional hearing, where he demonstrated how widespread the moral menace of obscenity was. His activism with the YMCA an
d citizen’s arrests of abortionists and sex educators made changes to U.S. obscenity laws that lasted almost a century. As a result of his work, any information about contraception and abortion was defined by the courts as obscene, and therefore illegal. He bragged in public speeches that his work had driven many women to suicide, and he was right. I learned a lot about Comstock’s life and legal battles from Amy Werbel’s incredible book Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock. I also took some of Comstock’s dialogue from his writing collected in Robert Bremner’s edition of Comstock’s 1883 book Traps for the Young.
Comstock’s persecution (and prosecution) led Spiritualist and women’s health advocate Ida Craddock to commit suicide in 1902. The character of Sophronia (Soph) is an homage to Ida, who was arrested after publishing a book about having very explicit sex with an angel named Soph. Though First Amendment lawyers (including Clarence Darrow) worked pro bono to argue Ida’s case, she was convicted of obscenity and sentenced to a lengthy jail term. Rather than go to prison, she killed herself. Ida also published an impassioned essay defending the sanctity of the danse du ventre on the Midway, which is how her work first came to Comstock’s attention. You can read Craddock’s work, including her essay on the danse du ventre, in Vere Chappell’s collection of her writing, Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock.
Comstock, with the Lady Managers, did visit the Midway dance attractions and convinced the general-director of the fair to get a court order to shut down the Persian Palace. A court immediately granted representatives of the Persian Palace an injunction and none of the dance attractions on the Midway were shut down. You can read more about this in Popular Culture and the Enduring Myth of Chicago, 1871–1968, by Lisa Krissoff Boehm.
All of the Midway attractions and World’s Fair locations in the novel are real, based on maps of the Expo drawn at the time.
A lot of seemingly insignificant details of 1893–94 Chicago life are based on truths about our own timeline, gleaned from historical documents available online. Seamstresses were in fact paid about $1.50 per day, and there was a successful strike led by steelworkers at the Expo to get overtime pay on weekends and after hours. Sheet music companies popped up on Wabash Street after the Midway closed, along with theaters advertising dancers from the Midway. Many commentators of the time complained that the entire city smelled like rotting meat because of runoff from the slaughterhouses in the river and sewer system. The problem continued until engineers working with the city’s newly formed Chicago Sanitary District reversed the flow of the Chicago River in 1900.
Raqmu, heart of the Nabataean Kingdom, is what I imagine Petra, Jordan, might still be called today if ancient Greeks and Romans had not colonized the city over two thousand years ago. Petra is the Greek name for a city that once called itself Raqmu.
Lucy Parsons was one of Chicago’s most respected anarchist leaders, and a founder of the IWW. Though she claimed to be indigenous or Spanish, scholars today believe she was an African American born into slavery. This is thanks entirely to new research by historian Jacqueline Jones for her book Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (which is what Tess had read, and referenced when she talked to Aseel and Soph). Lucy and Emma Goldman did in fact get into a very public fight over sexual liberation, equal to today’s biggest Twitter train wrecks. And yes, Emma did have a boyfriend named Sasha (Alexander Berkman), who failed spectacularly to assassinate Henry Frick. Emma continued to date him after he got out of prison. She was jailed by Comstock more than once for her writings and speeches about sexuality.
Aseel’s alter-ego Lady Asenath pays homage to an elusive figure called Little Egypt, who was rumored to be the greatest belly dancer on the Midway. After the Expo ended, many different performers called themselves Little Egypt, particularly white women who appropriated dances from nomadic groups in North Africa for their burlesque performances. Aseel is extremely loosely based on many of the dancers described by Donna Carlton in her excellent history of belly dancing, Looking for Little Egypt. One, Fahreda Mahzar Spyropoulos, supposedly came to the Midway from Arizona and later settled down in Chicago to run her husband’s restaurant. But Carlton can find no evidence that anyone calling themselves Little Egypt ever performed on the Midway. The name seems to have become popular afterward among burlesque and vaudeville dancers. It was used most famously by a dancer named Ashea Wabe. In 1896, Wabe was hired by two grandsons of P.T. Barnum—members of the Four Hundred—to perform the danse du ventre for their bachelor party at Sherry’s. After she was arrested on charges of stripping, the event became an enormous scandal, dubbed by the press “the awful Seeley dinner.” Wabe went on to become a notorious performer and very wealthy self-made woman. She died of gas asphyxiation in 1908. It was likely a suicide.
Grumpy theater critic George Bernard Shaw did indeed coin the term “Comstockery” to mean prudery or over-the-top moralism—though he did it about ten years after the events described in this novel. You can read his first use of the term in a letter to The New York Times in 1905 (https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1905/09/26/117951415.pdf). It became a popular term in the early twentieth century to mock people who wanted to censor art, or who were culturally ignorant.
Sol Bloom, remarkably, was a real person. In his early twenties, he was a music promoter who brought the dance troupe for the Algerian Village over to the United States from France, and wound up landing a job managing all the attractions on the Midway. Famously, he didn’t want the job and demanded a salary higher than the U.S. president. To his surprise, the city of Chicago met his salary request. After a very successful stint in the music business, he became a U.S. senator who advocated for immigrant rights until the day he died. He published a book about his life, called simply The Autobiography of Sol Bloom.
The song Aseel writes is a variation on the one attributed to Sol Bloom in our timeline. You can listen to Bloom’s song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A5yJ5Z2Ezw. I prefer Aseel’s version, partly because it actually makes sense. Sol always regretted that he didn’t act fast enough to sell the song as sheet music, thus securing the exclusive rights to it. The song was appropriated so quickly by other dance acts that it became basically a folk song, impossible to copyright. You’ve probably heard the tune, if you grew up in an English-speaking Western country, where it is synonymous with cheesy stripper music and Orientalist tropes. One of the common variants on the lyrics does include the line (presumably about Sol Bloom) about how the dance the ladies do “was written by a Jew.” And yes, the tune is also in a delightful Ke$ha song called “Take It Off.”
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is a real-life international organization whose members include scientists, industry researchers, and public servants who study Earth, our atmosphere, and space. They have advocated tirelessly for government and industry to recognize the reality of climate change. If we ever do find time machines in the Earth’s crust, AGU members will be all over that.
Most of the locations that Lizzy and Beth visit in Irvine and Los Angeles are based on places I knew as a teen in the late twentieth century. No, I never killed anyone, though I will confess that I might have thought about it a few thousand times. As we said back then: Irvine sucks. Some of Beth’s family backstory is based loosely on things I experienced. My great-grandfather was jailed for arson in the early twentieth century, and my grandfather owned an auto repair shop in Los Angeles until the 1980s. My father committed suicide many years ago, after struggling for a long time with depression. He and my mother went to college together at UCLA, and took me to the La Brea Tar Pits a lot.
I remember a world where abortion was legal in my country. I hope you do too.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was a work of collective action, and thanks are due to the many people who talked to me about it, read early drafts, and generally listened to me stressing out about it for two years.
First, thanks to th
e many scientists, researchers, and friends who gave me ideas. Physicist Adam Becker talked to me about the impossibility of time travel, and cosmologist Sean Carroll agreed that time travel was impossible, but kindly suggested I think about wormholes and a “narrative force” that creates a timeline. Geology researcher Josh Zimmt speculated about what people could eat during the Ordovician and what it would smell like. Ethnomusicologist K. Goldschmitt told me about the nineteenth-century music industry and appropriation. Archaeologist Sarah Wenner talked to me about the Nabataean Kingdom in the first century C.E. Historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman let me interrogate her about social change over centuries, and pop history chronicler Lynn Peril gave me tons of sources about rational clothing and New Women. Adrienne Crew, creator of the incredible Louche Angeles Instagram, told me about being a Black girl in the L.A. punk scene during the 1980s. Science history aficionado Esther Inglis-Arkell suggested that the villain of this novel should be Anthony Comstock. Author Jess Zimmerman talked to me about witchcraft. Critic Lynn Rapoport and filmmaker Fivestar spent many late nights talking to me about indie music, indie porn, and all the good things in between. L. A. Kauffman inspired me with her writing and political actions more times than I can count.
I also got tons of feedback from extremely kind, patient early readers. A zillion thanks to Tempest Bradford and Jaymee Goh for sensitivity reads, and to Claire Light, Charlie Jane Anders, Meg Elison, Chris Palmer, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, and Katya Lopez for feedback during revision.
I owe pretty much everything to my amazing editor, Lindsey Hall, who read three separate drafts and improved the book immeasurably. Also thanks to Liz Gorinsky for first believing in the book, and to Devi Pillai for making it happen. And of course, thank you to my astounding agent provocateur, Laurie Fox.
A very special thank-you to Mike Burns for Flin Flon advice, and to Peter Burns for his stories about getting there (and beyond) by boat.
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