“Come on.” Hyun-sik didn’t answer her question. “It won’t be long before someone else notices.”
They went to the control room, and Saki adjusted the settings and wiring to match what she’d seen in M.J.’s vid. The two young men sat together and watched her work, Kenzou resting his head on Hyun-sik’s shoulder.
When she’d finished, Hyun-sik came to examine the controls. “That is twenty years from now.”
“Yes.”
“No one has visited a future Chronicle before. It is forbidden by the IRB and the theory is completely untested.”
“It worked for M.J.,” Saki said softly. She didn’t have absolute proof that those distortion clouds in the Chronicle had been him, but who else could it be? No other humans had been here since the collapse, and whoever it was had selected expedition sites that she was likely to visit. M.J. was showing her that he had successfully visited the future. He wanted her to meet him at those last coordinates.
“Of course it did,” Kenzou said, chuckling. “He was so damn brilliant.”
Saki wanted to laugh with him, but all she managed was a pained smile. “And so are you. You’ll get into trouble for this. It could damage your careers.”
“If we weren’t here, would you bother to come back?”
Saki blushed, thinking of the letters she’d left in her quarters, just in case. M.J. had gone to some recorded moment of future. Maybe he had stayed there. This was a way to be with him, outside of time and space. If she came back, she would have to face the consequences of making an unauthorized trip. It was not so farfetched to think that she might stay in the Chronicle.
“Now you have a reason to return,” Hyun-sik said. “Otherwise Kenzou and I will have to face whatever consequences come of this trip alone.”
Saki sighed. They knew her too well. She couldn’t stay in the Chronicle and throw them to the fates. “I promise to return.”
* * *
This is a love story, but it does not end with happily ever after. It doesn’t end at all. Your stories are always so rigidly shaped—beginning, middle, end. There are strands of love in your narratives, all neat and tidy in the chaos of reality. Our love is scattered across time and space, without order, without endings.
Visiting the Chronicle in the past was like watching a series of moments in time, but the future held uncertainty. Saki split into a million selves, all separate but tied together by a fragile strand of consciousness, anchored to a single moment but fanning out into possibilities.
She was at the site of the xenoarchaeology warehouse, mostly.
Smaller infinities of herself remained in the control room due to projector malfunction or a last-minute change of heart. In other realities, the warehouse had been relocated, or destroyed, or rebuilt into alien architectures her mind couldn’t fully grasp. She was casting a net of white into the future, disturbing the fabric of the Chronicle before it was even laid down.
Saki focused on the largest set of her infinities, the fraction of herself on New Mars, inside the warehouse and surrounded by alien artifacts. The most probable futures, the ones with the least variation.
M.J. was there, surrounded by a bubble of white where he had disrupted the Chronicle.
Saki focused her attention further, to a single future where they had calibrated their coms through trial and error or intuition or perhaps purely by chance. There was no sound in the Chronicle, but they could communicate.
“Hello, my lifelove,” M.J. messaged.
“I can’t believe it’s really you,” Saki answered. “I missed you so much.”
“Me too. I worried that I’d never see you again.” He gestured to the artifacts. “Did you solve it?”
She nodded. “Nanites. The bases of the artifacts generate nanites, and clouds of them mix with the dust. They consumed everything organic to build the tops of the artifacts.”
“Yes. Everything was buried at first, and the nanites were accustomed to a different kind of organic matter,” M.J. typed. “But they adapted, and they multiplied.”
Saki shuddered. “Why would they make something so terrible?”
“Ah. Like me, you only got part of it.” He gestured at the artifacts that surrounded them. “The iridescent blue on the bottom are the aliens, or a physical shell of them, anyway. The nanites are the way they make connections, transforming other species they encounter into something they themselves can understand.”
“Why didn’t you explain this in your reports?”
“The pieces were there, but I didn’t put it all together until I got to the futures.” He gestured at the warehouse around them with one arm, careful to stay within his already distorted bubble of white.
In this future, she and M.J. were alone, but in many of the others the warehouse was crowded with people. Saki recognized passengers and crew from the ship. They walked among the artifacts with an almost religious air, most of them pausing near one particular artifact, reaching out to touch it.
She sifted through the other futures and found the common threads. The worship of the artifacts, the people of the station living down on the colony, untouched by the nanites. “I don’t understand what happened.”
“Once the aliens realized what they were doing to us, they stopped. They had absorbed our crops, our trees, our pets. Each species into its own artifact.” He turned to face the closest artifact, the one that she’d seen so many people focus their attentions on in parallel futures. “This one holds all the human colonists.”
“They are visiting their loved ones, worshipping their ancestors.”
“Yes.”
“I will come here to visit you.” Saki could see it in the futures. “I was so angry when Li sent drones to record the final moments of the colony. I should have been there to look for you, but that’s a biased reason, too wrong to even mention in a departmental meeting. I couldn’t find you in the drone vids, but there was so much data. Everyone and everything dead, and then systematically taken apart by the nanites. Everyone.”
“It is what taught the aliens to let the rest of humankind go.”
“They didn’t learn! They took all the organics from the probes we sent.”
“New tech, right? Synthetic organics that weren’t in use on the colonies, that the nanites didn’t recognize. You can see the futures, Saki. The colony is absorbed into the artifacts, but at least we save everyone else.”
“We? You can’t go back there. I don’t want to visit an alien shrine of you, I want to stay. I want us to stay.” Saki flailed her arms helplessly, then stared down at her wristband. “I promised Kenzou that I would go back.”
“You have a future to create,” M.J. answered. “Tell Kenzou that I love him. His futures are beautiful.”
“I could save you somehow. Save everyone.” Saki studied the artifacts. “Or I could stay. It doesn’t matter how long I’m here, in the projection room we only flicker for an instant—”
“I came here to wait for you.” M.J. smiled sadly. “Now we’ve had our moment, and I should return to my own time. Go first, my lifelove, so that you don’t have to watch me leave. Live for both of us.”
It was foolish, futile, but Saki reached out to M.J., blurring the Chronicle to white between them. He mirrored her movement, bringing his fingertips to hers. For a moment she thought that they would touch, but coming from such different times, using different projectors—they weren’t quite in sync. His fingertips blurred to white.
She pulled her hand back to her chest, holding it to her heart. She couldn’t bring herself to type goodbye. Instead she did her best to smile through her tears. “I’ll keep studying the alien civilization, like we dreamed.”
He returned her smile, and his eyes were as wet with tears as her own. Before she lost the will to do it, she slapped the button on her wristband. Only then, as she was leaving, did he send his last message, “Goodbye, my lifelove.”
All her selves in all the infinite possible futures collapsed into a single Saki, and she was b
ack in the projection room, tears streaming down her face.
* * *
We know you better now. We love you enough to leave you alone.
Saki pulled off her gloves and touched the cool surface of the alien artifact. M.J. was part of this object. All the colonists were. Those first colonists who had lost their lives to make the aliens understand that humankind didn’t want to be forcibly absorbed. Was M.J.’s consciousness still there, a part of something bigger? Saki liked to think so.
With her palm pressed against the artifact, she closed her eyes and focused. They were learning to communicate, slowly over time. It was telling her a story. One side of the story, and the other side was hers.
She knew that she was biased, that her version of reality would be hopelessly flawed and imperfect. That she would not even realize all the things she would not think to write, but she recorded both sides of the story as best she could.
* * *
This is a love story, the last of a series of moments when we meet.
RION AMILCAR SCOTT
Shape-ups at Delilah’s
from The New Yorker
The night after Jerome’s brother turned up on a Southside sidewalk, bloodied and babbling in and out of consciousness, Tiny took Jerome’s hand, sat him on a stool, wiped tears from his cheeks, draped a towel over his shoulders, and whispered, Relax, baby, you can’t go to the hospital like that. Your brother’ll wake up to that damn bird’s nest on your head and fall right back into another coma. For the next two hours, Tiny sheared away Jerome’s knotty beads until his head appeared smooth and black, with orderly hairs laid prone by her soft, smoothing hand. Back when they met, she’d told him she cut hair, said she was damn good, too. Jerome had nodded, smiled a bit, as if to say, How cute, and changed the subject. But now, the way his eyes danced in the mirror, the joy that broadened his face, it all said, Where in the hell did a woman, a W-O-M-A-N, learn to cut like that? She circled him as she did her work, looking at every angle of his head. She lathered up the front and went at it with a straight razor so that his hairline sat as crisp and sharp as the beveled edge of the blade that cut it. Tiny imagined slicing her finger while sliding it across the front of his head; her imagined self then smeared the blood all over Jerome’s face. After she finished and had swept the fine hairs from his shoulders and back, Jerome and Tiny collapsed onto the floor, spent, as if they had just made love for hours. On a bed of Jerome’s shorn hair, they slept into the early morning.
* * *
A year to the day after Jerome’s brother got out of the hospital, Jerome showed up at the only place he’d ever found comfort, on the doorstep of the woman he no longer loved and who, by agreement, no longer loved him. When Tiny opened the door that night she snorted and looked him up and down, this man she had been comfortable not seeing or speaking to for the past several months. Before she could complete her condescension, Jerome spoke: My mother is dead.
Tiny’s face grew tender with sadness and disbelief. She opened her arms and called for Jerome to rest his head on the soft roundness of her chest. But he breezed by her, eyes on the floor, and crumpled onto the couch. His face was so fallen she barely recognized him; sadness so chiseled into his cheeks and his brow that Tiny couldn’t imagine anything softening the rock of his face, so she sat and said nothing. She thought of how much she had loved Jerome’s mother—but that wasn’t the truth, simply one of those things people tell themselves when someone dies. The woman, Tiny realized, was just a proxy; it wasn’t for Jerome’s mother that she had once held an unshakable love but for Jerome himself. She opened her arms wide again and pulled him tightly to her body. His head nestled itself between her breasts. It felt wrong, terribly, terribly wrong. Jerome trembled in her arms. He wept and sniffled. Tiny brushed her lips against his cheeks, and then she stopped.
I’m sorry, Jerome, she said. I want to end all that pain you’re carrying, but I can’t do what you want me to do.
Damn it, he said. My mother just died. Is it that hard for you to break out your clippers and make me look presentable? Is your heart that full of ice for me? I got a funeral to attend. God damn it, my little brother was doing better, now I can’t find him and you not trying to help me. My brother is God knows where, doing God knows what drugs, in God knows how much pain, and you can’t offer me this simple kindness?
No, Tiny whispered. No. I can’t.
Still, she walked into her bathroom, whispering, No, as she grabbed the clippers, the razor, the rubbing alcohol, and a towel. She draped the towel over his shoulders and, in silence, she cut his uncombed locks. They both whimpered and sniffled a bit, avoiding each other’s eyes. When the tears blurred Tiny’s vision, she didn’t stop; instead, she let the salty drops drip onto Jerome’s head as she cut from memory, her smoothing hand rubbing the tears into his scalp.
It took her double the time of her most careful cuts, four whole painful hours. When she finished, Jerome thanked her and left, wiping his cheeks. I’m crying, he said, ’cause of my mom, but also ’cause this haircut is so goddam beautiful.
Tiny nodded, hoping that Jerome would never return. After she shut the door, she sat in the hallway sobbing into the night, until she felt as useless as piles and piles and piles of dead hair.
* * *
Tiny had started cutting hair almost on a whim. She had found her father’s old clippers at the bottom of a dusty box beneath the sink in a seldom used bathroom in the basement. Her father used to zug crooked lines and potholes into his three sons’ hair when they were young and not yet vain. Soon her older brothers no longer allowed the maiming, so someone buried the clippers under piles of stuff. When Tiny stumbled on the clippers, she realized she had grown tired of her perm. The time had come to shave it all off and let her natural hair grow long. She’d shape it and twist it, braid it and maybe lock it, as her mother had, but whenever her hair grew she felt the urge only to trim it into what everyone called “boy styles”: a faded-in Mohawk, or just a fade, or a Caesar, or a temple taper. It changed every two weeks. Soon Tiny began to choose her lovers based partly on the shape of their heads, what styles she could carve on their domes. When their heads no longer intrigued her, she would lose interest. These days, her hair grew long enough to keep in a simple ponytail, and that was how she wore it. She no longer had any interest in her own hair, just other people’s.
Nearly a year to the day after Tiny watched the folds at the back of Jerome’s freshly cut head bob out her door for the last time, Tiny’s Hair Technology opened up on River Way. The Great Hair Crisis was raging on with no visible end. Every single barbering Cross Riverian man somehow losing his touch, the ability to deliver even a decent shape-up. Afros had abounded within the town’s borders since that moment in ’05 when all the clippers and cutting hands began shaving ragged patches into heads. It had been ten years of this wilderness, this dystopia. Men with beautiful haircuts became as mythical as the glowing wolves—lit up like earthbound Canis Majors—that are said to walk the Wildlands. Sonny Beaumont Jr., once Cross River’s greatest barber, now looked like a haggard old troll; he was about forty-five years old, and resembled a wrinkled set of intertwined wires covered in the thinnest, baggiest brown flesh. There would never again be any good days for Sonny. Even decent haircuts stayed frozen in his past, and all he was capable of now were messes—carefully, carefully carved messes. His remaining customers patronized him only out of loyalty—poisoned nostalgia for the perfect cuts they’d once received—and false hope.
All those Cross Riverian Afros left one to ask, Who cursed Cross River? A shop opened up on the Northside—a decent shop—only for the owner to die of a heart attack mid-cut. The two remaining barbers opened shops of their own, and eventually murdered each other in a gunfight over customers and territory. Kimothy Beam closed his business, Mobile Cutting Unit, after his haircut van flipped during a police chase. He served three months and hung up his clippers for good when the authorities turned him loose. There was a long scroll of such mishaps:
haircutting men, always men, driven from the business and, in some cases, from this world, through some misfortune. That’s not going to be me, Tiny thought. The simple science of haircutting gets down into one’s bones, into the soul of a person. She watched the peace settle over her customers after a good cut. They’d walk out into the world, where the noise would start again, but that moment at the end of a fresh cut—from the crack of the cape, as she removed it from a patron’s shoulders, to the door—was pure, pure magic.
Tiny no longer cut her lovers’ hair for free. They’d have to pay like anyone else. After Jerome, she’d loved Cameron, and then Sherita passed through her life, and then Bo and Jo, and Katrina, and De’Andre and Ron. They all fell out of love with her when they realized she wouldn’t use her magic on them. And that was fine with her; it was easy for Tiny to fall out of love with them, too. Jerome seemed so long ago. She hadn’t even loved him best.
* * *
In the scheme of things Tiny’s Hair Technology is just a footnote, but it would be even less than that had the shop not opened during such desperate times. A shop of lady barbers? Who had ever heard of such a thing? It was Tiny and Claudine and Mariah at first; later, a whole cast of lady barbers passed through. No one expected anything but another business popping up and then shuttering within a couple of months. There had been five in three years in that location. Folks in the neighborhood had taken to calling it the Wack Spot, a dingy cardboard box of a structure tucked away at the edge of an unimpressive side street. Behind the building stood knotted trees that stayed bare no matter the season. The jutting branches resembled skeletal fingers, so the building appeared always on the verge of being snatched into an abyss. The Wack Spot was salted earth; no successful business could sprout from the ruined soil. There was the roti shop that never seemed to have any roti. Then there was Ice Screamers (later Sweet Screamers, and, as a last ditch, Sweet Creamers), a soft-serve spot run by a surly guy with an eyepatch. For the previous several months the Wack Spot had housed an adult bookstore that, much to the dismay of the surly ice-cream peddler, retained the final name of the soft-serve spot. It was common knowledge that only a witch spouting the most forbidden of spells could make the Wack Spot work, and Tiny figured she would be that witch, conjuring the pitchest-black magic from the back of her spell book.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 Page 23