Finally, when all the party and most of the guests had gone, she saw him in the garden walk outside Cecil Green, and went out to meet him.
“You’re late,” she says.
“I’m sorry.” He looks around, taking in the afternoon sun and the color of the leaves, the mountains in the distance framing the coastline of Vancouver. “I missed something.”
“Only your daughter’s wedding,” she says, wistfully. Then throws her arms around him. “I’ve missed you.”
They stay there a breath, holding each other, and for a moment there is nothing but the flowers and the trees and the chirp of birds. And the world whirls around them, the world of spirals and hypercatenoids, of tesseracts and planes.
“Oh God, you don’t look a day older than when we last met,” she says. “And look at me… Men are lucky; you go gray and you don’t have to do a thing.”
He smiles. “Where I’m from, we don’t have to go gray.”
They’re walking now, through the amazing gardens and terraces, the panoramic sweep of cliffside architecture, and she’s telling him everything about the wedding—about the florist who was able to find enough Oceania roses just in time, about how long it took to find the bride’s gown and how eventually they settled on a Cecilia Wang design, how one of the bridesmaids dove to the floor to catch the bouquet, how the newlyweds were flying to Paris before heading back to Oxford where they now lived.
“How long do people live, where you are?” she asks.
“Longer, but not forever.”
“Have you cured cancer?”
“It depends on what kind of—” He stops, stares at her for a long time.
“Come into the ballroom,” she says at last. “Come and dance.”
September 29, 2059
She is sitting on a collapsible canvas chair in the middle of a field, a copy of Pablo Neruda’s Veinte Poemas open on her lap, a bouquet of flowers on the grass in front of her—when he appears.
In the distance, a man watches in a blue spinner, not moving.
Sean walks up to her. She drops the book, and turns.
The hair, the eyes, the face. It’s her, but it isn’t.
The woman stands, walks toward him. “I was never sure you were real, or someone her mind made up, because of the war,” she says. “But it is you.”
Sean can’t breathe, stares at her in wonder.
“Shauna Penrose,” she says. “I’m Caitlyn’s daughter.”
“I met you when you were seven.”
“She told me everything, finally. She told me how you met, how you died, how you lived.”
Only then does he realize that the field is marked by small, white slabs—flat, raised-top stone markers—as far as the eye can see.
“I’ve been coming since last week, on your anniversary. I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I came because of her, because she asked me to.”
She holds out her hand, palm up, a neck-chain hanging from the medallion.
“She wanted you to have this,” she says. “She lasted a long time. Also—she wanted you to know, she waited for you as long as she could.”
He takes the medallion and touches her hand—his daughter’s hand. And suddenly they’re crying, holding each other across the vastness of time and space, comforting each other in the way that only two people can, two people who share something dear that they have lost.
“I’ve got to go now,” she says, finally, gesturing to the man in the spinner.
“Wait,” Sean says, but she keeps on walking.
She stops only before she gets in, then turns to him one more time. “There’s so much I want to talk to you about. So much I want to know that I don’t know,” she says. “But I do know one thing: she did love you. Maybe that’s all that matters.”
And she is gone.
He drops to his knees in front of the space where the bouquet and marker lie, and traces the words in a whisper—
CAITLYN McADAMS FORREST
July 1985 – August 2059
Hereafter, only love remains
A Word from Samuel Peralta
“Hereafter” was my first sojourn into fiction, after a long, exclusive love affair with poetry.
I was writing a piece for Synchronic—an anthology of speculative fiction edited by David Gatewood—when I first met Cpl. Caitlyn McAdams.
She was a character in the story I’d outlined, about a platoon fighting a war in another place, another time. Somewhere in the middle of the telling, she stopped everything, turned to me and said: Listen. I have another story for you.
Now, experience has told me that when a character wants to tell her story, you listen.
What Cpl. McAdams told me, over several breathless weeks, was a story about time travel—but it was really about distance and longing, about separation and faith, and whether in the end, love is truly enough.
* * *
In poetry, I’d been able to explore the deepest human thoughts and feelings, communicating them to readers through the telepathy of metaphor.
Exploring the bond between a vampire and its victim was really an exploration of abusive relationships. Genetically tweaking avian embryos to recreate dinosaurs was a metaphor for resurrecting a lost love. Fragments from a girl’s war diary became a symbol of hope.
And time? Time is that that great gulf that can separate lovers, whether through distance, through resentment, or through silence.
* * *
Writers live for epiphanies, those moments of clarity or inspiration that catch you by surprise. One of those moments found me in a bookstore, while admiring the poetry of Margaret Atwood.
From the shelf I’d pulled out The Journals of Susanna Moodie and leafed through pages of indescribable beauty, pain, insight.
I noticed that, of Atwood’s array of volumes on the shelf, all iconic titles—The Edible Woman, The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, The Year of the Flood, and more—none, save one, were poetry.
Or were they? Atwood’s prose reads beautifully, almost as if it had been written in verse.
That moment was the epiphany—that poetry could be found in works like Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Luis Zafón, or Ru by Kim Thúy.
* * *
“Hereafter” is thus my love letter, my envoi to the world of poetry, while tarrying at its border.
It’s an excursion across that border into a new world of metaphors—the same world that includes Liberty, Humanity, Trauma Room, Faith and my other stories—a world where time travel is just beginning to be realized, where pervasive surveillance is a part of life, and where non-human self-awareness has begun to make humanity face difficult questions about itself.
Approached in any order, these stories—like “Hereafter”—stand as separate rooms, as it were, in the same new labyrinthine world.
Cpl. McAdams, thank you. How I would love to explore with you all those other stories, all those rooms in the labyrinth! If only there was world enough, and time.
She leans in and whispers to me: There is. Come with me.
And I do.
“Hereafter” was a Notable Mention in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams.
Samuel Peralta is a physicist and storyteller. He has designed robots for nuclear applications, and headed start-ups in software and semiconductors. An Amazon bestselling author and anthologist, he is the creator and driving force behind the Future Chronicles anthologies.
http://www.amazon.com/author/samuelperalta
http://www.samuelperalta.com
A Note to Readers
Thank you so much for reading The Time Travel Chronicles.
Through the work of a number of talented authors, editors, artists and other contributors—and the amazing support of readers like you—the Future Chronicles series has become one of the most acclaimed short story anthology series of the digital era, hitting the top ranks of not ju
st the science fiction, fantasy and horror anthology lists, but the overall Amazon Top 10 Bestsellers list itself.
The Future Chronicles has also inspired several other quality anthology series in speculative fiction and in other genres, and inspired scores of spin-off stories, novels, and series. It’s been amazing.
If you enjoyed the stories in this book, please keep an eye out for other titles in the Future Chronicles collection. A full listing of titles, which can be read in any order, can be found at
www.futurechronicles.net
Finally, before you go, we’d like to ask you a very small favor, if you please: Would you write a short review at the site where you downloaded this book?
Reviews are make-or-break for authors. A book with no reviews is, simply put, a book with no future sales. This is because a review is more than just a message to other potential buyers: it’s also a key factor driving the book’s visibility in the first place.
More reviews (and more positive reviews) make a book more likely to be featured in bookseller lists and more likely to be featured in bookseller promotions. Reviews don’t need to be long or eloquent; a single sentence is all it takes. In today’s publishing world, the success (or failure) of a book is truly in the reader’s hands.
So please, write a review.
Then tell a friend. Share a link to us on Facebook, or maybe even a Tweet—link to our books at www.futurechronicles.net. You’d be doing us a great service.
Thank you.
Samuel Peralta
-----
Subscribe to The Future Chronicles newsletter for news of upcoming titles, and to be eligible for draws for paperbacks, e-books and more – http://smarturl.it/chronicles-news
The Time Travel Chronicles Page 40