Making History

by Rick Wilber

  “Don’t you see?” he shouted. ‘The Japanese would not be any better for Hawaii than the Americans! Why would you think so?”

  “Well,” she said then, her voice newly fierce, “Then there must be a way for me to regain my own sovereignty. To solidify some sort of political power. To make a difference to my people. No other Hawaiian monarch has known as much as I do about how the world is today. I know politics, history, economics, languages. I know how we can hold our own internationally. We have riches here - the riches they all want to exploit. It’s all I think about. There must be some way for me to use what I know. There must be a reason for me! And if there’s not, I have to make one!”

  She stopped for a moment, then spoke. “The old holy ones had a phrase for it. Chanting the universe. Maybe I can chant a new universe for us. Or at least plan one. There must be some way.”

  “Of course,” he said. “But what?”

  He realized what it was that might work at the same instant that she did - he could see it in her eyes as they stared at each other.

  “Take the bones, Ka’iulani,” he said. She’d brought clothes with her across time, across the universes. Why not bones? He laughed wildly. “There is mana in them. Much power. I’ve felt it. The old kahunas will side with you, and then so will all the Hawaiians. They will unite the country behind you, uhane maka. As long as they know that you will preserve what matters most to them - the life of the land. How does it go? What Kamehameha III said? Ua mau ke ea o ka aina I ka pono. ‘The life of the land is preserved in its righteousness.’ You are the rightful ruler of Hawaii, in every way, Ka’iulani. You can preserve the land.” With every true and terrible word, he was driving her away from him. Toward her own life.

  “There’s only one thing.” She swallowed. “If I do, if I take the bones, I don’t think I will ever see you again,” she said. “Taking the bones - that will change everything.” She knew it. He did too. She looked down at them. “I can’t do this.” Her eyes filled with tears.

  If she stayed here with him, she would never be queen. She would be as good as dead. He knew this. Still he wanted her to stay. But the thought clicked bright as crystal in him: this is a branching universe. And her will, strong as it is, and her unique position there, can create an entirely new branch. She could explore, in a new way. She could explore time.

  But perhaps her old ones had the explanation which best fit, at least for her: they were friends of the soul, and had somehow found each other. Yet she had to leave this universe, the universe of her death, the place where he lived, behind.

  And he had to let her go.

  “You must,” he said gently. “I think this is exactly what these bones are for. Why they were saved. Why I have them.” He knelt and carefully wrapped the bones in the tapa cloth, positive that whatever the old ones had inscribed upon it would prove to the old kahunas that they were the bones of Kamehameha, and that Ka’iulani was thus meant to be queen. At this instant, their universes were the same, for the very last time. The bones would change all that. If the kahunas believed in Ka’iulani, in her love of the land, they would rally the will of the Hawaiians.

  And she could rally their minds, deal with the legalities, set up an effective legislature, and beat the greedy Americans at their own game.

  Cen finished wrapping the bones, stood, and held the awkward bundle out to her. It was like throwing his heart in the ocean.

  With a cry, she took the bones and clutched them to her chest.

  Then she and the bones were gone.

  In the bright sun, listening to the surf, watching the giant power windmills of South Point, which receded in a row toward the main body of the island, he sat alone with his thoughts.

  ***

  After several years, Cen finished his doctorate and married a beautiful Hawaiian nanochemist. They had four girls, very smart and also very beautiful, of whom he was quite proud.

  His grand theories about time remained untouched. He worked bits and pieces of those ideas into things that he did, and prospered, as much as a scientist can, working on his papers, getting grants.

  But a part of him always felt empty, as if there was an open window somewhere from which came a cooling, sometimes chilling breeze, but which he could never actually find. It was a part of him which was open to infinity, where there were no mirrors, where the pattern did not continue, but skipped, finding no purchase, no surface. He was one tiny being on a globe of thought where gravity barely held. He remembered, always, the time it had let go.

  ***

  Cen was in his fifties when, one day, he went for a two-mile hike out to Kaena Point.

  It was a long hot walk along the old railroad bed, where dirt had fallen into the ocean below in places, leaving only moldering crossties and a treacherous path. After an hour, he was at the point.

  Sacred Kaena, hot dry desert sticking like a sandy tongue into deep currents, strewn with enormous boulders, riddled beneath the cliffs with tiny hidden coves. Beaches ten feet wide where surf thundered and then was caught a few yards from shore by coral ledges, where water lapped crystal through tidepools, filling and receding, filling and receding, the breath of a blue goddess.

  Honolulu was not visible from here, only the Makaha coast, its dry mountains changing instant by instant as broad swatches of sun lit the valleys and then vanished behind cloud. It might be two hundred years ago.

  An old woman was standing in front of the sun on the rocks. She was only about fifteen feet away, and about six feet above him, and she was gazing out over the sea in the direction of Kauai, which Kamehameha’s war fleet had set off for twice and been destroyed by storms both times, so that he never conquered Kauai, but got it by treaty - the Kauai chief being afraid that his luck wouldn’t hold the next time.

  She was very thin. Her head blocked the sun so that her face was dark, and a white nimbus stood out around it. He could see the elegant lines of her collarbones as they angled in from her shoulders. She wore a long holoku patterned with repeated brown figures, like tapa.

  Cen watched her crouch; one strong hand grabbed hold of a coral knob. She jumped down in a fashion nimble for one who appeared so ancient.

  She walked toward him slowly, bending once to stick her finger in a tidepool and smile. Probably some scuttling crab. Then she looked at him directly and settled, her holoku drifting around her feet as she hugged her knees. “Aloha,” she said.

  Cen’s greeting caught in his throat. She was the memory of this sacred place, maybe. He’d read that Kaena was where souls leapt to the next world; a place where the spirit and the real worlds mingled. Nobody looked this way, so regal, so enchanting even though so old. Nobody real.

  She tilted her head. “I’m real,” she said, and he shivered as salt spray speckled him.

  “I am, too,” he said, and they both laughed. “I just didn’t think I’d see anyone today. Way out here.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “What do you mean, you know?” he asked.

  She settled back against the rock, stretched out her legs, closed her eyes. “The sun feels good,” she said. Then she stretched out her arm, let her hand lay open on the sand next to him. “Hold an old lady’s hand,” she said. “I feel very lonely today. Sometimes I do, sometimes I cannot help it. And even though I know better. Now . . .” her voice trailed off, and her mouth curved in a slight smile.

  In her voice, he heard a familiar tone. He grasped her hand tightly, and strength flowed into him.

  He knew, but dared not say so, then.

  He stared out at the glittering ocean. The sun blazed, and he closed his eyes, going back, back, back, as he did in the best times, and something in him healed.

  When he awoke, he was alone. The tide was licking his feet and had wiped her footprints away. All his unasked questions - did Hiroshima still happen, in her universe? Or something worse? - did not seem to matter. She had been real. And she had come to him. The wind dried his tears as he walked back toward the mainland, the
lights of little Makaha town shining like stars in the warm, perfect night.

  Louise Marley is an award-winning novelist and musician who writes feminist fantasy and science-fiction novels and short fiction under her own name and historical fiction and fantasy under the names Cate Campbell and Louisa Morgan. She is a winner of the Endeavour Award and has been shortlisted for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. This story brings together her talents in both writing and music, using time travel to explore some possible histories of Johannes Brahms and his enigmatic “P Dolce” notation.

  Frederica Daniels lay on the elaborately-appointed hospital bed as if frozen. Her skin was the dull white of the olive blossoms brushing the window above her head. Her eyes did not so much as flicker beneath their shadowed lids. Her brown hair hung in limp strands beneath the cap of sensors, almost indistinguishable from the wires that fell over her shoulders and looped off to the emitter array. Kristian looked down at her, surprised by a feeling of sharp disappointment.

  She had been romanticized by the media discussions and net reports. Kristian had expected her to look like the formal, touched-up sort of photos the reporters used, mostly showing her at the piano, her plump figure draped in evening attire. Gazing at her now, Kristian couldn’t help thinking how distressingly plain she was. She had a high, rather lumpy forehead, almost nonexistent eyebrows, a thick nose, thin lips. She had been twenty-four at the time of Insertion. She was twenty-five now. Young, brilliant, much-mourned scholar. The lost girl.

  The technician stepped behind the emitter array and did something with the dials. Kristian bent closer to the bed, searching for some sign of life. Even her chest barely seemed to move, only an infinitesimal rise and fall as she breathed. Where are you, Frederica?

  The technician, a physician’s assistant from the Insertion Clinic in Chicago, grimaced at him across the jumble of machinery. “She won’t know you’re there, I’m afraid. There’s been nothing since the beginning. We lost her the very first day.”

  “How did you know?”

  The PA nodded to the bank of machinery filling one entire wall. The Mediterranean sun glinted on its dials and silver flat screens. “You know how the Insertion process works?”

  “Brain-wave mapping, as I understand it. Codify the consciousness.”

  “Right. And copy it into the temporal coordinates you want. Those screens are blank because hers disappeared.”

  “What disappeared?”

  “Her consciousness. The chart of her brain waves. The doctors have tried everything, but they can’t find it. Can’t get it back.”

  Kristian stared down at the unprepossessing form of Frederica Daniels. Other than the shallow rise and fall of her bosom, she lay utterly, absolutely still upon the hospital bed. Tubes ran from her nose, from her mouth, from the veins in her hands.

  The PA went on talking, outlining the prep process, but Kristian tuned him out. He had reviewed it exhaustively on the plane to Pisa.

  It could have been himself lying there on the bed. The approval of Frederica Daniels’ application to be inserted meant the denial of Kristian’s. Too expensive, the Insertion Clinic said, to fund two musicologists. Kristian’s credentials were solid, but Frederica’s were blazingly impressive, even without her family connections. She had earned her Bachelor’s at eighteen, her Master’s at twenty. Her DMA was pending the very research that placed her on this bed.

  Frederica Daniels had been destined for high scholarship from childhood. She was the only child in a family that boasted more than one well-known musician and academic. Her elite schools had groomed her in every way to become the most impressive Brahms scholar of several generations.

  Kristian Nordberg’s background could hardly have been more different from Frederica’s. Born to working-class parents, who would never understand his obsession with a composer dead more than two hundred years. Kristian had worked and struggled his way through school. Frederica and Kristian had both set their sights on the answer to one, small question of performance practice, but, in the end, it was to have been Frederica who would solve the puzzle. Her dissertation was to have preceded his own, making his work redundant. He had been struggling with acceptance of that when word came that things had gone awry with her Insertion.

  It wasn’t that the Insertion Clinic cared about what Brahms meant by p dolce, of course. What they cared about was adding another scholar’s research to their already impressive list. Having an obscure musicological puzzle solved increased their credibility with their donors, many of whom were art patrons as well as supporters of scientific innovation. But Kristian and Frederica, and performers and musicologists over the centuries, cared passionately about this small, obscure marking in Brahms’ work. And Kristian understood why Frederica had won, and he had lost. He read her master’s thesis, but more importantly, he knew her background. He understood her connections.

  But now, shockingly, everything had changed. Frederica lay like a corpse on the bed, and the Insertion clinicians had run out of ways to try to recover her. They had no option left but to call in Kristian, the runner-up, the second choice. This failure of Insertion had made headlines around the world in academic and in scientific circles. This failure had stopped their work dead. Kristian was their last hope of finding out what had gone wrong, and he jumped at the chance.

  Kristian kept his eyes closed for a long moment, fighting the vertiginous feeling that came with Insertion. He reminded himself, as he struggled against nausea, that it wasn’t physical. Still, he felt rocked by it, as if he were upside down.

  He gathered his resolve, swallowed, and opened his eyes.

  He found himself standing in a dirt lane, just outside a rock-walled garden. A scrolled cast iron gate stood slightly open. Climbing roses spilled over the crooked wall and twined through the gate’s pattern, filling the air with their sweet scent. Everything seemed to glow with abnormally yellow sunshine, as if some sort of filter had been removed. The air looked so clean he could imagine it tingling in his lungs.

  It’s all real, he reminded himself. It’s completely real. I’m the only thing that’s not.

  He was, of course, only an observer. He had been told it would be like watching television, seeing and hearing, but unable to touch, taste, or smell. In the actual event, Kristian found the analogy a poor one. The sensation of being present in 1861 Castagno, in the hills of Tuscany, was so vivid that he thought if he were to pinch himself, it would hurt. Ahead he saw the old stone houses, a dozen of them, named for the months of the year, crowding together over narrow cobbled streets. To his left, the lane fell away steeply down the hill to the valley. Three days before, in his own time, he had driven through that valley, past factories and gardens and shops. Now he saw nothing but open ground, scattered olive trees, the twisted balletic forms of grapevines.

  The gate before him shone in the sun. He passed into the garden of the little villa, wishing he could feel the cushion of moss beneath his feet, the shade of the drooping Italian pine on his head. No television screen could so perfectly convey what this must be like, the air sweet with the scent of roses, their petals stirred by a light breeze coming down from the hills.

  And then he heard it. It was the dark-light sound of a fortepiano - a real fortepiano, not a twenty-first century imitation - coming from the villa. He took a deep breath - did his body, in its own time, take a deep breath? - and moved to the front door.

  It seemed obtrusive, outrageous, to simply pass through the door and into the house, but of course he could not knock. Nor could he wait for the door to be opened. He must simply pass through, a ghost, a shade, an uninvited and unseen guest.

  He stepped forward, or felt as if he did. Kristian Nordberg, or at least the essence of him, codified and measured and Inserted into another time, moved over the doorstep of Casa Agosto and went inside.

  ***

  She saw him slip through the door, diffidently, a little guiltily, very much as she herself had done six months before. She saw him, and she trembled in he
r hiding place.

  Frederica knew who Kristian Nordberg was. Her father had monitored the application process at the Insertion Clinic, had made calls to the president of the board and the director of the program. She knew all the five names on the short list, and she knew how close Kristian Nordberg had come to winning the grant. She had looked him up. His credentials impressed her, especially because he had been a scholarship student. He had earned a Master’s Degree in piano performance from Julliard, and was already teaching at Oberlin.

  It was his press photo that made her heart sink. Kristian was a handsome man, blond, lean, and tall - just the kind of man who would never give Frederica Daniels a second look.

  She had known since early adolescence how plain she was, even ugly. After a brief bout with bulimia, which she found disgusting, she had given up on her figure, deciding that being slender would not help to make her pretty. She poured herself, instead, into her studies, delighting her parents and her teachers. The Insertion was to be the crowning achievement of an already stellar academic career. She would become the pre-eminent Brahms scholar in the world, would be invited to speak at conferences, offered chairs at universities, have her dissertation picked up by a national publisher. She, and she alone, would truly understand what the Master had meant by marking his scores p dolce.

  Frederica had never planned to lose herself in the nineteenth century, nor had she intended to hurt anyone. She had intended merely to observe, as all the other Inserted subjects had done. She had intended to listen, and learn how the simple marking of p dolce was interpreted by the Master. Her offense was, she believed, one of impulse, of temptation too great to resist. And whether one judged it kindly or cruelly, she could not - she would not - retreat now. Frederica Daniels had never, in all her life, felt so happy.

  She had no doubt Kristian had come looking for her. In truth, she had half-expected such a development for weeks, and had only wondered if she would recognize whoever they sent.

  No one had seen her own entrance, of course. She had spent her first hours flitting past the inhabitants of the villa like a curious spirit. She knew Johannes immediately, but it had taken a bit longer to puzzle out the cook’s identity, and the gardener’s, because her Italian was not so good as her German. Even her German was modern, and some days had passed before she felt confident of her nineteenth-century pronunciation. Still, disregarding the language difficulties, she had slipped into her hiding place by the end of that first afternoon.