Future Tense Fiction Page 11

  “I specialized in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  He succeeded in getting the bartender’s attention and fell silent for a moment while the bartender refilled their drinks. He took a long swallow and glanced at the baseball game; the bartender had rotated the projection for a better view of a replay, and now there was a holographic outfielder directly over the bar. “Nothing sinister,” the businessman said finally, when he saw that the singer was still watching him. “Genealogical research for high net-worth individuals. Look, I’m not saying it’s safe. But if it makes you feel better, it’s not a free-for-all. There are controls in place, both technological and human.”

  “Human?”

  “I was required to meet weekly with a handler in the local time.”

  “Kind of a weak control,” the singer said.

  “Well, you might be right about that. It was the technological controls that got me fired.”

  “Why’d you get fired?”

  “I tried to avert a car accident.”

  The singer was quiet, watching him.

  “I didn’t think the scanners would pick it up. I knew it was stupid, but it’s not like I tried to avert the First World War.” The singer frowned. Her grasp of 20th-century history was shaky. “No matter what I did,” he said, “everything I tried, she still got in the car, and the car still crashed.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Just someone I saw every time I went back. My handler’s secretary. I liked her. Kind of a sad story.”

  The singer liked sad stories. She waited.

  “OK,” the businessman said. By now he’d had a little too much to drink. “So this person, the secretary, she grows up with nothing, terrible family, meets a guy with money, falls in love with him, and then a few years later he goes to jail for some white-collar thing. Long sentence, judge wanted to make an example of him. All of his assets were seized, so she’s lost everything. She tries to—no, that’s the wrong word, she succeeds in starting a new life. Changes her name, gets a new job, picks herself up.”

  “And then?”

  “And then she dies six months later in a car crash. I don’t know, I guess I’d been in the business for too long. Maybe I got a little burned out. I was always so careful. I filed these impeccable itineraries with Control and never deviated from them, never tried to change anything, but this person, Rose, she looked a bit like my daughter, and I just thought, what harm would there be, making this one change? Averting this one thing? Most people don’t amount to much. Most people don’t change the world. If she doesn’t die in a car accident, what harm is there in that, really?”

  “Isn’t that exactly the kind of small thing—”

  “Imagine walking into a room,” he said, “and knowing what’s going to happen to everyone in it, because you looked up their birth and death records the night before.”

  The singer seemed to be searching for something to say to this but failed. She downed the last of her scotch.

  “I’m sorry. It’s an unsettling topic. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  “My shuttle’s probably boarding by now.”

  “You see the temptation, though? How you might want to just make this one small change, give someone a chance, maybe just—”

  “‘Genealogical research for high net-worth individuals,’” the singer said. “You must think I’m an idiot.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Anyway, thanks for the drinks.” The singer was sliding carefully from her bar stool.

  “You’re welcome,” said the businessman, who hadn’t realized he was paying. He watched her walk away and then touched one of the buttons on his shirt, which he’d kept angled toward her. The recording stopped.

  “Fucking creep,” the bartender muttered, under his breath. The businessman settled up and left without looking at him.

  Later, in his hotel room in Colony One, he dropped the button into a projector and played the conversation back. A three-dimensional hologram of the singer hovered over the side table. I’m going to the moon. A touch of excitement in her voice. In the background, the shadowy figure of the bartender polished a glass while he watched the baseball game. The businessman turned the volume to low. He liked to keep a recording going in the background when he was alone in hotel rooms, so as not to get too lonely. But this was the wrong hologram, he didn’t like the way the bartender hovered, so he scrolled through the library and picked out another: Rose at her desk in the 21st century, her smile when she looked up and saw him. He adjusted the speed to the lowest possible setting. The walk past her desk took only two minutes, but in slow motion there was such stillness, such beauty in her small, precise actions—as though underwater she turned from her keyboard to look at him, then back to her keyboard, her hand reaching for a file and bringing it with heartbreaking slowness down to the desk, and all the while he was gliding past her, on his way to Gattler’s office—and this seemed the right recording for the moment. He changed into his pajamas, switched off the bedside lamp so that the only light was the pale glow of the hologram by the bed. He stood for a moment by the window while he brushed his teeth. The hotel was expensive and looked out over a park, and it occurred to him for the thousandth time that if he hadn’t spent time on Earth, he might not know the difference. Tomorrow he’d board the first train to Colony Three, go home and tell his wife what had happened, sweep their little daughter up into his arms. Would his wife be angry? He thought she’d understand. They’d talked about getting out of the industry. But for now he was alone in the quiet of the room. He would never return to the 21st century, and there was a sense of liberation in this. He could find a new job. He could live a different, less haunted kind of life. In the silence of the room, the hologram of Rose was reflected on the window, turning in slow motion away from him, superimposed on the pine trees and tall grass of the park. An owl passed silently between the trees.

  A BRIEF

  AND FEARFUL STAR

  Carmen Maria Machado

  Mama did not talk about her journey west very much; the circumstances had to be right. When she did—in the electric moments before rainfall, if a rabbit crossed clockwise against our path, if she found me flipping through the battered almanac from the year of my birth—she described it like a painting she was viewing through a fever.

  “The light,” she said once, when we encountered a set of twigs that had fallen into the shape of a cross. “It was like being underwater, all blue and soft and bright.”

  “It was so cold and I was sick with you,” she said another time, digging a splinter out of my palm with a pocketknife. “Everything felt wrong. I was very afraid.”

  Then, once, just before I turned 10, when a brush fire lit up a distant ridge and it burned through the night: “Your father drove our wagon, of course. Sometimes I would lean against him and look up at the sky and—”

  The way her eyes went empty, it felt like watching her die. The next year, when I did, all I could think was how it felt like watching her talk about the sky.

  Before the light left her, we lived—just the two of us—on a patch of prairie. Our house was the center of it, a pip in a magnificent apple.

  With no natural borders save the creek, the boundaries of our land seemed to move every time I visited them. I often imagined that my right eye was soaring above me, clutched in the talon of a large and terrible bird, the earth below expanding and contracting like a heartbeat.

  The sky was open and alive above us, too. Storms boiled across the sky in the summer, and in the winter the mean snow landed on my face and refused to melt. I loved our fragment of wilderness. Every season we’d get a few traders—offering us cinnamon, flour, silver hand mirrors, gingham, chirping automata that sang and told the future—but otherwise we lived untouched, binary stars in our own private universe.

  I was a nervous child. I gasped when flint was struck, and when sparks flew whimsically out of the hearth. Mama tri
ed to help—once, she caught the spark and showed it to me; a speck of ash marring the planetary surface of her palm—but I could not explain that, while I understood the principles of the thing, there was something about the erratic arc of it; the suddenness, the wild, alien dive, that awoke a terror within me. There were other fears, too: a crevice in the wall near my bed that corralled a beam of moonlight into my room at certain times of the month; the way water spiraled around gullies and divots. It was a kind of motion, a kind of gravity, the way the light bended to its own ends. I felt I knew terrors that lingered just beyond my vision; as if their very existence was seared into my cells. At night, when I cried, Mama came to me and weighed me down with her torso until calmness filled me. “Come back to me, my mouse,” she’d say.

  There was something else that haunted me, too. When I lay in bed at night, I perceived giant, ancient creatures moving just outside our walls; rumbling and snarling, darkening the windows, blotting out the moon. Though they lingered just beyond my vision I knew them to be true, though I could not understand them.

  “There’s something outside,” I told her, the first time I sensed them.

  “There’s nothing,” she said. “I’ve been sitting by the window.”

  “They’ve always been here,” I said. “Monsters.”

  She brought me, then, a small box, and from it removed a claw, a set of teeth, a slender bone of rock, all things she’d pulled from the land on which we lived. “This is all that’s left of them,” she said. “I know it feels like we are the first people on this land, but we have been preceded by monsters and men alike.”

  I had questions about those monsters, and those men. “But outside—”

  “They’re gone, mouse. They were here but they’re not anymore.” And for a moment, calmness filled my fear, like a gorge flooding with rainwater. But when it abated, the gaping ache in my chest seemed to me how animals must feel, how they must have always felt, lowing for the muscle and ferocity of their mothers.

  I don’t remember coming to the farmstead. Mama had joined the caravan west swollen with the promise of me, and I was born, over two days, along the trail that led us here. (‘What of my stars?,’ I asked her once. ‘You moved beneath the sky as you were born, she said, and therefore have no clear celestial map.’) “It was a mad time,” she said. “Everything seemed alive. The trees and brush made promises they could not keep. The wagon moaned in its sleep. Animals spoke to us. An oxen told me I’d have a little girl. Even Bonnie chatted. She told on your papa when he broke my mother’s clockwork map; the one from Switzerland.”

  “Bonnie doesn’t talk,” I said, though my voice curdled with doubt. As if to underline my confusion, Bonnie emerged from a shadow and sat before both of us, her tail twitching with purpose but otherwise silent as you’d expect.

  “She did, once,” Mama said. “But the day you were born, she shut right up.”

  Mama made jokes but sometimes it was hard to say what the joke was about. Was the joke that my body silenced Bonnie, or that Bonnie made words, or that Bonnie cared about me at all?

  Sometimes, I try to imagine that I remember the dioramas that moved around us when I was still tangled up in her. I imagine that the walls of her fine strong animal body glow with light, and that I can hear the soft and muffled testimonies, the confessions and laughter, the camaraderie of the wagon train.

  (‘Do you know she’s a banker’s daughter?’

  ‘The rivers are too high.’

  ‘Even bankers have daughters.’

  ‘Did he tell them about the tack?’

  ‘The sky is the color of milk, and it is not promising.’

  ‘Olga promised me.’

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Don’t you know they’ll stay that way if you don’t stop?’)

  And then, behind their chatter, something terrible. Something in the sky, burning.

  Even on my 11th birthday, Mama took me with her to move the cattle, who were pulling up dirt and refusing new grasses. As I followed her outside, I wondered if my father had ever imagined his wife and girl-child alone out here (‘We each need a hatchet, us and the baby,’ my father had told her), the wagon turned to dwelling, the cattle’s calves grown and sired and birthed and died many times over.

  Mama disappeared over the hill with a switch in her hand. I watched but did not follow. The horizon was milky and amber, and I saw the beginning of a figure there —a wagon, a dark shape against the light. When Mama returned with the herd, their shadows had joined into a single many-legged creature. I stroked their velvety pelts as they trotted by. (Mama had been rich before she came married by father and came west, though you’d never know it by her labor. ‘What did it mean to be rich?’ I asked her once. ‘It meant money had too much meaning and yet none at all,’ she said.)

  “Someone’s coming,” I said, pointing. She squinted against the light and then nodded. “I hope it’s a trader,” she said. She didn’t say who else it might be. When we went inside, Mama gave me a cake she’d made special—cinnamon, raisins, a glug of rum from the bottle hidden beneath the floorboards. I pinched off a little and put it on the floor for Bonnie, who sniffed it contemptuously. From the wall, a brown mouse dashed and seized the cake, bounding back to safety while Bonnie looked on. She did not hunt anymore. She was bony and slow; too old to chase after the mice who were endlessly birthing new mice to replace them. What could she do to stem that tide? They existed with impunity. Mama huffed through her nose like she did when she was displeased; she did not like that I’d helped the mouse eat, and she did not like that the mice existed at all.

  When the shadow arrived, just after noon, it was, indeed, a man bearing a wagon of goods. We had never met him before. We saw so few men that each one was like a minor nightmare, as strange and unknowable as the creatures that I saw outside my windows. This man kept his beard shorter than some of the others, but I did not like the broadness of his shoulders, which seemed so natural on my own mother but so alien on him. “Flour?” he called, as he pulled the horse to stop. “Bacon, seeds, cloth, coffee? I have some more exotic wares, too, if that interests you.”

  “Exotic?”

  “A brazen head I picked up in Kansas City. A jade necklace.” He glanced upward, as if to aid his recollection. “Tinctures, tonics, an astrolabe, and a pneumatic gewgaw that recites Scripture.”

  Mama rubbed the back of her neck. “The normal goods will do,” she said. “Come in; I’ll take a look.”

  Inside, he rolled a pack open on our table so that we could examine his offerings. “I have more in the wagon,” he said, “if this doesn’t satisfy. I could—”

  “My husband is out with the cattle,” Mama said brusquely, to discourage the question. She examined the offerings solemnly as a scholar, peeling a corner of fabric from its bolt, smelling a bottle of oil. I sniffed the oil, too, though I did not know what I was smelling for; it was pungent and unpleasant, in a pleasant kind of way. The man glanced around the room at our three hatchets, our iron stove, Bonnie snoozing on the quilt, the daguerreotype of my father on the dresser. I did not like his staring, that he was seeing so many things and drawing his own conclusions about us.

  “It’s my birthday,” I told him.

  He turned and appraised me over the sharp angle of his cheekbones. “Perhaps your mother might like to get you a present?”

  Mama glanced at me, and I looked at the table, which held so many strange and specific objects that it felt like a test before a cosmic judge. I ignored the doll—a childish thing, and I was not a child anymore—and the thread, the spices, the candles, and the recent almanac. Then Mama pushed aside the doll and I saw what rested beneath it: a short-handled knife the length of my hand. She lifted the knife and examined it from every angle; she then balanced it on her finger, as if an alchemist performing an obscure science. Her mysteries filled the room; both the man and I watched her with a stillness. She nodded.

  Outside, the trader returned his pack to the wagon and extende
d his hand to me. “May I show you something?” he said.

  I looked up at Mama, who was standing in the doorway. She nodded, and I handed him the knife. He kicked a small rut into the dirt and lopped off the head of a thick of grasses next to the house. He tucked them into the divot and then lifted the knife upward. “Knives do more than cut,” he said. The blade caught the sunlight and brought it down toward the earth. The motion of it—the slow turn of the metal, the way the light sharpened to a point and then fell toward us, toward me—made me gasp and buckle. I realized I was screaming after it began, and I ran into Mama’s arms like the child I was.

  The man stood over what he had created. Smoke curled into the air. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were afraid of fire.” He stamped out the fingerlings of flame and offered it back to me, handle-first.

  When I did not move, Mama took it from him. “She’s not afraid of fire,” she said. “But thank you.” I listened to the rest of the transaction buried in her skirts; the oil and knife were now ours.

  He mounted his wagon and did not wave goodbye, as so many of the others had before.

  Mama watched him as he retreated. She worked her jaw as if chewing a knot of sinew, but I did not ask what she was thinking about. When he was swallowed up by the horizon, she went inside to apply the oil to the baseboards. “Perhaps it’ll discourage the mice,” she said.

  Soon we would discover that she was wrong. Attracted to the sharp scent, they soon began creeping toward the stains in curiosity. She cornered and caught them in jars and drowned them in buckets of water. Some escaped, scuttled back into the walls, only to sire more, but she kept at the impossible labor. There was something about seeing her, sleeves rolled up, heavy with the task, that filled me with joy. How I loved her, my mother, and the stories within her.