“I came down a couple of days ago,” C.L. added. “Anita said you’d be here.”
“What about… is anything else different? The Comstock Laws?”
Anita shook her head. “Abortion is illegal.”
The edit war was far from over, but I was intoxicated by the news that at least part of my edit had taken. I couldn’t quite believe it. When I’d studied this period, there was no record of a person named Sophronia Collins fighting Comstock. I’d met her by chance at the Algerian Village. I allowed myself a moment of satisfaction. It was the first time I’d made an edit of any significance, and that meant I might be on the right track.
Early the next morning, Anita knocked on the door of our room at the inn. “We’ve got a slot at 9:30 A.M. Let’s go.”
Morehshin would be doing another demo of her collective travel technique for a small but admiring audience of scholars and techs. The Machine room at al-Khaznah was already full when we arrived, its sandstone walls carved with abstract designs and inscriptions in pre-Nabataean. Some of these explained the rudiments of the interface, which the ancients treated like rule-based magic. Now, there were two steam-driven tappers in place to pound out the pattern that would open a passage to our destination. We stood at the center of a shallow bowl worn into the smooth rock by thousands of travelers over thousands of years.
“You must all be touching me when we do this.” Morehshin waved us in close. I wrapped my arm around Morehshin’s waist, then positioned Soph’s back against my chest, her arm curved around Anita. Anita tucked C.L. between the two of us. At last, we were all spooning each other and hugging Morehshin as tightly as we could. From above, we must have looked like we were doing a Busby Berkeley dance. But from eye level, we were merely a group of travelers, slightly sweaty and desperate. Morehshin reached out and clawed the air open overhead, revealing that square black interface controller I’d seen for the first time at Flin Flon. Inside it, attenuated light wavered like it was traveling through fluid. Then Morehshin drew a zigzag shape in the air, while palming the multi-tool. It strobed pink.
“Hold on!”
I had never gripped my sisters harder than I did in that moment. Fluid sloshed up from the floor, filling my nose and mouth with a swampy froth, and then we were in wormhole free fall until we landed hard in the middle of nowhere. There were no bureaucrats or techs. We stood on a bright, sandy cliff, sterile except for a few patches of lichen that looked like black stains. A shallow emerald ocean stretched below, thick with vegetation that broke the surface. The air smelled intensely of salt. And then, with a shock, I noticed the rock ring, its rough red surface encircling us. Overhead, the canopy looked like a parasol made of fluid, filtering the light through rippling waves.
A peculiar silence hung over everything, and I realized there were no birds calling to each other over the swells. I could hear only faint waves and wind scouring the seemingly infinite volume of empty yellow rock behind us.
“Where are we?” I muttered it into the skin of Morehshin’s neck, and tightened my grip.
C.L. looked around wildly, their hair brushing my cheek. “Holy shit. I think we’re… in the Ordovician.” They started to pull away from our cluster, pointing at something huge and armored that swam through the waters below.
“Don’t let go!” Morehshin was pounding a travel pattern into the ground with her feet and trying to torque something in the canopy overhead.
Abruptly a hot rain gushed from the crust beneath us and the air became void. We emerged on the floor of a smoky cave lit by torches. All of us were covered in a thick layer of dust that made me cough uncontrollably. Eight slaves sat in a semicircle around us, flanked by baskets of bones and lithics. These people, some with the dark complexions of Africans and others with varying shades of Mediterranean tan, were the tappers of classical antiquity. Property of the Raqmu Machine’s priesthood, they pounded out rhythms that programmed the interface. A bored-looking man with oiled brown skin and gold bangles on his upper arms sat on a stone bench beside us, its contours softened by several layers of furs and rugs. He nodded, his clubbed beard protruding stiffly from his chin, and made a quick notation on a damp slab of clay.
“Welcome, travelers.” He spoke Nabataean. As my eyes adjusted, I realized we had arrived at our destination. Barely.
“That was… not good.” C.L. was shaken. “I haven’t seen anything like that before.”
Anita whirled on Morehshin. “What did you do to get us back?”
“Reset to last destination.”
“There’s a reset button?” C.L. perked up.
“It’s complicated.”
“Get out of the circle. You are blocking travel.” The bureaucrat was irritated. “And show me your marks.”
Soph addressed him in halting Nabataean. “We apologize. Thank you for your hospitality.” Then she followed us awkwardly out of a thick red circle painted onto the floor. It marked the boundaries of the wormhole opening the same way the ring once had.
“So many of you,” he marveled. “I did not know that was possible.” He made another notation on the tablet, then checked our marks. When Soph shook her head, he frowned. “You cannot travel without a mark.”
“She’s my student, so she travels on my mark.” Anita was brusque, as if this were done all the time.
“I’ll need to inform the Order.” He referred to the priesthood that controlled access to the Machine during this period. “Travelers without a mark are in violation of the law.”
“Well, you’ve never seen five people come through, have you? We’re part of a new experimental group in 2022 C.E.,” I said. My grad school Nabataean was rusty, but he seemed to get the gist.
The bureaucrat frowned and stood up, blocking our exit. “You need to come back tomorrow and speak to the Order.”
“I will.” Anita drew herself up to full height, towering over him. People in the ancient world were usually at least a foot shorter than modern humans, and Anita was imposing even in our present. He bowed his head and stepped aside.
“See that you do.”
“Let’s go before he starts asking more questions,” Anita whispered in English as she led us out of the travel chamber into the temple proper, an atrium with high, curved ceilings and red walls. Light spilled in through the doorway and windows, illuminating scholars studying tablets and scrolls at a wooden table. Incense curled into the air beside a few shrines. People came and went from various side rooms on traveler business, barely noticing us. They were used to people in anachronistic clothing wandering out of the Machine chamber in a daze.
“Are they going to send me back to my time?” Soph raced to keep up with Anita’s pace.
“They would if we brought you back tomorrow, but we won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because if all goes well,” I said, “we’re going to sacrifice you to the goddess al-Lat.”
TWENTY-FOUR
BETH
Los Angeles, Alta California (1993 C.E.)
After not speaking to Lizzy for so long, sitting in her car felt like returning to a childhood playground. It was familiar, but also somehow smaller and less colorful than I remembered. She drove up the I-5 while I pored over the LA Weekly listings, pausing to read a story about how geoscientists were reporting strange activity at the Machines. Unfortunately the bit about Ordovician algae was only two sentences long, lost in a boring discussion of whether the Chronology Academy was corrupt. I crumpled the paper under my seat and sighed.
It was too late to scrounge up an invite to a backyard party, and besides it was Tuesday. The legit venues were probably pretty dead too. We decided on an all-ages show at Starless, a café in Echo Park that was a regular hangout for some of the girls we’d met at backyard parties.