Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 (21 page)

He had a vision, and in it a nine foot tall, one thousand pound animal stalked down the mountain highway's shoulder; and it too had feathers hanging in ragged tatters from its tiny arms. It paused and watched with disinterest every passing car, just out of the headlights' reach. The Utahraptor sniffed the breeze, snorted, then stalked on, unstoppable, inexhaustible, relentless.

Leon wondered how far a raptor could go, following a scent?

Nancy Kress is the multiple-award-winning author of much science fiction and fantasy, most notably the classic Sleepless trilogy that began with
Beggars in Spain.
The author tells us: "Like most SF writers, I occasionally ruminate about time. Like most senior-citizens-and-how-did-that-happen, I occasionally ruminate about things I might have done differently during my life, or reacted to differently, or at least viewed differently." And because writers tend to ruminate on paper the result of that rumination is...

She transfers slowly, painfully from the robocar to the floater, Liam gently helping her. Every part of her body hurts; RenewGen can do only so much, and today she has not taken her pain meds. Liam frowns. He disapproves of this trip, but it isn't in him to thwart or scold her, to be less than kind. Sweetness like honey on the tongue, she used to say of his father, dead now these thirty-three years, his bones buried somewhere under the alien red soil of Mars. Thirty-three years! Where does the time go?

It doesn't. That is, of course, the whole point.

"Careful, Gran," Liam says.

"Always. After all, I'm not 110 anymore." An old joke; there are so many old jokes. But this one, she remembers now, was with his uncle, not him, and Liam looks baffled. Sometimes she gets lost in time, as if it were a maze.

It is not a maze. It is a loaf of bread. That, too, is the point.

"I used to make my own bread. Pumpernickel and rye and the most marvelous sourdough," she tells Liam. He nods, without asking why this is relevant. He knows.

Sarah yells up the stairs, "David! Aren't you ready
yet?"

David clatters down the steps, shirt unbuttoned, permanent scowl beneath the new, wispy, ridiculous mustache. It looks like half a dozen spider legs unaccountably clinging to his upper lip. He is thirteen.

"I told you we had to leave by 7:05 at the very latest and it's 7:20 already!"

"Chill, Mom." He goes out the door and climbs into the Toyota. Ava and Aidan both fuss as she straps Ava into her car seat, Aidan into the infant SnugRide. 7:27. David will be late for school, Sarah late for work. Again. Aidan lets out a huge fart and, from the sudden awful smell, a load of wet shit. Ava goes, "Eewww!" David pops in his iPod ear buds, as if sound could obliterate odor. Aidan wails.

Sarah drives grimly, fingers clenched on the wheel. She drops David off at school— not even one other car still on the pick-up loop—and Ava at pre-school. Aidan cries the entire time. He is still crying when she hands him, as gingerly as an IED, to Mrs. Frick. The babysitter clicks her tongue at the smell, at the dampness, at Sarah's obvious bad parenting. Her look could wither a cactus. 8:09. By the time she gets to work, finds a parking spot, and runs to the elevator, the staff meeting has been in progress for thirty-five minutes.

"Sarah," says McAffee, "how nice of you to honor us with your presence."

The floater is cushioned, and she floats along the corridor on invisible mag-lev wings, Liam walking by her side. A few people glance curiously. This is a place of brisk, competent people, of uncarpeted corridors, of nameplates that are neither boastingly large nor self-effacingly small. Scientists, engineers, technicians. There are no old people here. She sees no one over ninety.

Liam's hand, laid protectively over hers, has two small brown dots near the thumb. Surely he isn't old enough for age spots? She can't remember what year he was born. But his twins are in school now, she remembers that.

"One more transfer, Gran," Liam says as he helps her off the floater and onto the Throne. That's what she immediately dubs it: a great padded chair royal with silver wires, ruby lights, data screens glinting like mirrors. How long ago was it that clothing had all those tiny mirrors sewn into it? She had a long red skirt, full, the mirrors at the hem flashing every time she moved.

This high-tech throne is a long way from the simple hominess of bread. Not that she had ever been one for that. Too often the sentimental cliché meant "simple" and "homey" for the husband and children, bought with exhaustive, unending effort by a wife trying to do it all. Although maybe it was different now. "Ready, ma'am?" a tech asks. She is ready.

Sarah makes her presentation at the morning's second meeting, knowing that she is not sufficiently prepared. It goes neither well nor badly; she was always good at winging it. But her mind is too much on the lunch-hour meeting across the street.

At 12:10, already late, she is dashing from the building when a young woman blocks her path. "Margaret Lambert?"

She is startled: by the use of her despised first name, by the expression on the young woman's face. It somehow seems both stern and compassionate. Sarah says, "Yeesssss...."

"You have been served," the girl says, and hands Sarah an envelope. Almost immediately she melts into the noon crowd. Sarah opens it. Mack is suing her for divorce. On the way to the marriage counselor. Where he agreed to meet her twelve minutes ago. He has had her served
on the way to the marriage counselor.

Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, Sarah lets out a cry of sheer anguish, high and almost inhuman, the scream of a rabbit with steel teeth clamping closed on its leg. People stop, jerk around, stare.

Oblivious, she starts to sob. The paper blurs. Sarah cannot stop sobbing.

He wants custody of the kids.

She is eased onto the Throne, which is surprisingly comfortable. But why shouldn't it be comfortable, considering what such "private usage" is costing her. The fee for her five minutes on the Throne will considerably reduce her grandchildren's inheritance. Liam doesn't mind, but not all of the others are so understanding. She knows that Amarinda thinks that Sarah should take advantage of the new euthanasia capsules, painless and instantaneous and so tiny, as if death were made less monumental by arriving through a dribble of liquid like a raindrop. Amarinda wants her inheritance before it is all spent on "frivolities" like this. The child was always greedy, always.

But it is her money. Once Samuel's, now hers.

The techs attach things to her: electrodes, implants, leeches, and maggots—she doesn't know what they are. It doesn't matter. What do these young men and women think of her skin, so dry and pitted and spotted that it might as well be the Martian surface where her son died?

"Are you ready, ma'am?" a young woman asks. Pretty, even with that bizarre haircut and the fashionable body staining. The staining looks like port-wine birth marks, which in her day people tried to cover with make-up or laser off. She remembers how young skin, stained or not, feels: her own once, her children's, Liam's, his children's. That baby smell at the back of the neck, like powder and dew.

"Ready," she says. They lower a small screen in front of her eyes, a screen no bigger than the envelope for a letter, when people still sent love letters through the mail.

Sarah can't stop wailing. She sounds like Aidan shrieking with a full diaper. Mack has just dumped a load of shit on her, and she stands on the sidewalk and sobs. Eventually a man—tentative, nervous, kind—puts a hand on her arm.

"Miss, are you all right?"

She is not all right. Her husband wants a divorce she did not see coming, her job is shaky, her kids might be taken away, she has had five hours sleep every night for months. There is no other way to get everything done, and even so she can't do it all. Mack, she realizes, is one of the things she didn't get around to. Not often enough, not with enough attention—give me another chance! Give us another chance!

"Miss, can I call you an ambulance? Are you in pain?"

She is in pain. Everything in her hurts. David, Ava, Aidan—she cannot lose them. She cannot. But Mack has the money, the stellar job, the jokey easy ways that David and Ava love:
Daddy! Daddy's home! I love you best, Daddy!
And although Sarah does not admit this to herself, not yet anyway, Mack also has the girlfriend willing to be the stay-at-home mom that Sarah cannot be. She doesn't know the girlfriend's name, doesn't officially know that she even exists, but in some way that transcends chronology, she knows about Denise.

There is always a Denise.

"Picture time as a loaf of bread," Dr. Martin Callister had said in his holo interview. She had watched the program three times, leaning forward in her powerchair, trying to ignore the pain that meds no longer quite masked. "If you slice bread directly across the loaf, then each thin slice corresponds to a section of time—say, Tuesday, March 4 at 9:30 A.M. On that slice is everything happening at that moment. The slice behind it is 9:29 A.M.

"But what if you slice the bread not straight across but on the diagonal? Then a slice might contain moments from March 4, from April two years earlier, from September two hundred years earlier."

"A pretty analogy," the interviewer said. She was a skinny, snide redhead, her tone stained with forced amusement. "But time is not bread."

"No. But time is as real as bread, a physical entity subject to mathematics. And the equations say that everything is simultaneous. Where equations go, engineering eventually follows."

"So you've built a time machine."

Dr. Callister, a large mild man with gray eyes that reflected light, gazed at her. "No. No travel is involved. A user cannot affect anything that has happened, ever. All the Chrono does is show on a screen what is already there, was there, will always be there."

"And so you can see the future, too?"

"No."

"Why not, if it's included on your so-called 'diagonal slice of time'?"

"We don't know why not."

"A flaw in the science, then," the interviewer said triumphantly, as if she'd just won a contest.

"A flaw in the engineering, perhaps," Dr. Callister said.

"So why should tax payers fund this flawed contraption?"

Dr. Callister said mildly, "You're an ass."

Watching, she laughed aloud, a sharp hard sound, like she imagined meteors made striking the rocky surface of Mars.

The kind man on the sidewalk raises both hands, lets them fall helplessly, looks around. As if this were a signal, two women approach from opposite directions. Sarah puts her hands over her face. She is appalled at herself, embarrassed clear to her marrow, but she can't stop crying. Her life has just shattered open, and the tender insides, light-sensitive, burn under the terrible laser of her own gaze.

Machinery turns on. A low hum, a sudden warmth, although maybe she only imagines that. Still, the reason these five minutes are so expensive is the enormous energy required, so maybe the heat is real. The small screen in front of her eyes brightens.

"You do understand, Gran, that you can't change anything? Can't even communicate with anybody living or... you do understand?" Liam, in the robocar, his face furrowed with anxiety that she will be disappointed.

"I know, Liam." She does know. He does not, not anything really. He is too young. It is not his father that she wants to see.

On the screen, Sarah stands sobbing on a city sidewalk. How young she looks! Three strangers flutter ineffectively around her. After that day, she never saw them again. Never got to thank them for their humane, useless sympathy.

Sarah concentrates her will. This is why she has left off the meds today; they blunt her concentration. She wills her message—because she must try, she has known she would try since the moment she saw Dr. Callister's holo—across eighty years, toward the sobbing woman who has reached her emotional and physical limits and cannot go on.

If I knew then what I know now....
People say it all the time in the retirement home. Her friends, those few still alive, repeat it like a mantra. They mean:
I wouldn't have married Emily
or
I would have had RenewGen much earlier
or
I would have bought that stock at 130
or
I would never have let Aidan go to Mars to die.
But that wasn't what she wanted to tell Sarah. That sort of advice would not have changed anything, because nothing can ever be changed. What happens to us was set in motion long before we were born, by fate or history or genetics or a loaf of bread.

But one's perceptions of what happens—maybe that can be changed. And she has a secret weapon.

It will be all right,
she thinks at the screen, throwing everything that she is into the thought.
In the end, it will be all right. He will not get the kids. You will come to know that he wasn't worth this unspeakable agony, that he did you a favor by leaving. In a few years you will meet Sam, all sweetness and money. There will be other sweetnesses, too, unexpected moments when happiness will suddenly bubble through you like all the fragrances of spring. You will survive the loss of Mack, and Sam's eventual death, and even Aidan's. It is all survivable, and you are strong enough to do it. Get off the damn sidewalk!

She squeezes her eyes shut and tongues the capsule hidden in her cheek. Her tongue brings it forward and she bites hard. Death is the only thing stronger than pain. In a head-to-head contest, death always wins.

"Gran?" comes Liam's voice, from very far away.

Sarah finally lowers her hands from her face. The gesture hurts; everything on her hurts. The air has suddenly brightened into glittery shards, sharp enough to wound. Her own red blouse blinds her. Each blade of intensely green grass could slice bread. Strangers press too close to her.

"I said, do you want us to take you to the hospital?"

"No, no.... I... no." And then, "I must get off the sidewalk."

They let her. She lurches away, process papers in her hand. The envelope falls to the sidewalk. Sarah doesn't know where she's going.