Chow and I agree that I should travel back to the Hirnantian, the latest stage of the Ordovician, to investigate those fluctuations and scoring marks in more detail.
TWENTY-THREE
TESS
Raqmu, Ottoman-occupied territory (1893 C.E.)… Nabataean Kingdom (13 B.C.E.)
Our first morning in nineteenth-century Raqmu was full of warm light. Soph and I shared a bunk, curling together, and her hair had come loose to tickle my nose. I disengaged from her soft form gently, trying not to wake her. Today began our search for the right bureaucrats to get us a slot on the Machine.
Before anything else, however, I wanted news from America. The mail service at Raqmu was so reliable that we already had a stack of letters and telegrams waiting for us in the post office. I returned to our rooms with a thick envelope from Aseel that turned out to contain newspaper articles as well as pages of her tidy script. We read everything over a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs and sesame bread. Aseel wrote that Soph had been convicted of obscenity, a federal crime. Authorities were hunting for her, but only half-heartedly: Comstock insisted she had drowned herself rather than face imprisonment. He clearly wanted to add her to the list of other immoral women he’d driven to suicide. “It is not a question of sympathy, or lack of sympathy for this poor woman,” he told the Tribune. “But it is a question of preventing the youth of this great country from being debauched in mind, body, and soul. I do not know of any obscene book that contains matters more dangerous to the young, than the matters this woman has published.”
Soph let the papers slide from her fingers and stared into space. “I guess this is what the afterlife feels like.”
“No.” Morehshin smacked her hand on the table. “This is what it feels like to survive.”
“Well, then I’m going to write Aseel and let her know that I haven’t yet pierced the veil. I don’t suppose there’s a way for me to write once we arrive in the past.” She looked hopefully at me.
“Not really. I mean, you could leave something in one of the archive caves, but frankly there’s no guarantee it will stay there. There have been a lot of purges over the millennia.”
“What about the subalterns’ cave? The one Morehshin talked about?”
Morehshin shrugged. “I looked on the way in, but it’s not here. Must have been dug later.”
“All right, then.” Soph sounded depressed as she rooted through her satchel for paper.
There were people I had to see about access to the Machine. So I left the two of them in the hostel, Soph writing sadly and Morehshin running her multi-tool over the walls, conducting an analysis that defied translation.
My destination was a nondescript two-story structure cut into the walls near an ancient theater, its facade bumpy with Victorian flourishes. AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION, read a large plaque mounted over the double doors. Over time, this archive for geoscientists had grown to become part professional association and part meetinghouse. The AGU cave was also permanent home to a small council of underpaid academics who held positions in the Raqmu Machine bureaucracy.
A bell tinkled as I opened a wooden door set into the cave entrance, as if this were a dry goods store. Beyond an unoccupied reception desk was the library, whose battered chairs and tables looked pretty much the same as they did in 2022—though they lacked a fleet of computer terminals. I was about to take some creaky stairs up to the council offices when somebody shouted my name.
It sounded like Anita, but that couldn’t be right.
“Tess! You’re here!” Definitely Anita. What the hell? Had something gone horribly wrong? I walked into the library, and found her sitting with C.L. and a few students, surrounded by piles of books. Despite the weirdness of seeing both her and C.L. in the wrong time, I suddenly felt like everything would be all right. My best friend was here. I practically knocked over the table next to her in the midst of our enthusiastic hug.
“Why are you both in 1893?”
C.L. cleared their throat. “We’re… uh… researching… things?”
I was nonplussed. “What’s going on? Has something happened with the Applied Cultural Geology Working Group?”
Anita and C.L. looked furtively at each other. “We need to talk to you about something.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s… private.”
The students made a big show of leafing through their books and tried to act like they weren’t listening. Anita glared at them until they suddenly decided it was time to go out for brunch in Englishtown.
When the door slammed in a cacophony of bell noises, C.L. jumped up and started pacing. I noticed they had a new ocular implant, forming a faint crescent-shaped bulge over their right eye. “I’ve completed my field season, and anomalies are increasing at the Machines. A few more people came back covered in extinct single-celled organisms from the Ordovician. One told me off the record that he’d seen a glimpse of an archive cave, like you did. So I’ve been systematically going back to different periods in the Raqmu Machine, trying to figure out if something in the mechanism has changed. I kept wondering whether the wormhole might be dipping into the past before linking to the correct time. It’s kind of what you’d expect if the interface were… buggy, I guess.”
“The Comstockers?” I felt cold.
“Well, it might be wear and tear. More people than ever are using the Machines, and we’re using them in new ways. Morehshin showed us that there are parts of the interface that we didn’t know existed, and we have to assume people are using those in the future all the time. But…” They looked uncertainly at Anita.
“But what?”
“The Comstockers may be getting somewhere. My guess is that they’re destabilizing the wormholes. I went back to the Ordovician from here and found these cuts in the rock, with traces of metal alloy in them that could only come from humans…”
“Why would sabotage on the Raqmu Machine affect Flin Flon, though?”
“You know the hypothesis that the Raqmu Machine controls the others? If that turns out to be true, then all they have to do is destroy this one.”
“And then we’re completely fucked.” Anita was grim. “We’ve got to stop these shitlords before that happens.”
“I don’t get why they would do this. If they lock the timeline, they can’t make edits either. They might get stuck in a timeline where… I dunno, things are pretty much like this one. Universal suffrage.”
Anita looked at me like I had eaten a library book.
“Don’t you think it would be bad enough if we were fixed here in this timeline, where women can’t get abortions and black kids are being murdered by cops? They don’t need to take away our right to vote to make our lives hell.”
She was right, as usual. “So… why did you come to find me?”
“We need Morehshin to take all of us back to 13 B.C.E. There’s someone there I need to see.”
“That’s where we were headed anyway.”
Anita nodded curtly. “Excellent. I’ve already booked us on the Machine.”
“Okay, but I am still confused. How did you know that we would be here?”
Anita’s expression was unreadable. “Ah. You don’t know yet.”
I blinked. “What do you remember?”
“A Spiritualist named Sophronia Collins committed suicide under very mysterious circumstances, after Anthony Comstock got her convicted for obscenity during the World’s Fair. I wasn’t sure, but I guessed that was your handiwork. Especially because you wrote that paper about secret travelers using suicide as a cover to escape their present. I figured you’d hidden her in the past, and that meant you’d come through here. I’ve been waiting for a couple of weeks.”