The Time Travel Chronicles (55 page)

The Time Traveller’s Sonnet

And there you are, at last: your eyes, your face.

Just as swiftly, only a memory,

a star irresolute, the lightning’s trace,

a half-remembered verse of poetry.

Still, you are what keeps my atoms in place

against life’s centrifuge of anarchy:

your smile, in its sadness a hint of grace,

my hope, my manifold geometry.

To be with you again, I would cross space,

and time, to where began this circled journey:

And there you are, at last: your eyes, your face.

Just as swiftly, only a memory,

a star irresolute, the lightning’s trace,

a half-remembered verse of poetry.

The train rounds a curve without slowing down, and for a second the cars jiggle around their connection and the lights go black. The train straightens out and the lights go back on.

“Marry me,” he says.

“Are you crazy? The next time we meet, I’m going to be older than you are.”

“You’re not married, are you?”

“That’s beside the point. Why?”

“Because ‘you are what keeps my atoms in place against life’s centrifuge of anarchy,’” he says.

“Sonnets,” she sighs.

September 25, 2025

She’s sitting on a park bench at Ron Searle Park, watching the children on the playground. Behind her, the sounds of volleys on the tennis courts. She’s scattering the remnants of an egg sandwich to the pigeons on the grass.

When he appears, she flings herself at him, beating him on the chest. “What the hell are you doing here? Get away from me! I hate you!”

As he backs away, a little girl hops off of the slide and runs toward her. “Mommy, Mommy!” She’s crying.

Caitlyn hugs her, shielding her from the stranger, speaking to her softly. The little girl is still weepy, but she’s nodding. After a while, she’s back on the playground, this time at the swings. She swings in a wide arc—high, down, and back—kicking her feet down as they graze the ground, legs up again as she swings up, high, down, back.

Her mother is still fuming as she sits back down on the bench.

Sean waits a few minutes before joining her—taking care to place some space between them. “I’m sorry,” he says.

She says nothing for a long time. Then—

“Shauna turned seven in June. And she doesn’t even know her father.”

He’s not sure what to say. “Shauna,” he repeats.

“Shauna Catherine. She doesn’t deserve this, Sean. She deserves a father who’s there for her, who can carry her on his shoulders, read her bedtime stories, teach her how to drive, give her away at her wedding.”

He can’t say anything, hadn’t expected this.

“It’s not fair to me.” There, she finally said it. “It’s not even as if you’re in Australia or England, and I can get you on the phone or fly to you. When you’re gone, you’re gone.”

“Caitlyn, if I could come back and be with you here and hereafter, I would. I would move heaven and earth to be with you. I would die if that would bring me to you.”

She is crying now, remembering Kandahar.

“But I can’t,” he says, taking her in his arms. “This is our hereafter, this is our forever. To the limit of what God and physics allow, I will be with you.”

The little girl swings high, then low.

“I may go—but I’m still here. Love remains.”

The little girl swings low, then high.

September 27, 2038

She’d been waiting for him at the church at St. Alban’s Road, looking back once too often at each of the faces filing in.

Then she’d looked for him at the reception, at the mansion and conservatory at the northwest corner of the university.

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

Thank you so much for reading
The Time Travel Chronicles
.