Now I was frustrated. “So nobody knows how historical change works culturally or physically? How can we… I mean, what are we even doing?”
Anita grinned. “You really should study time machines. We all start out with that same what-the-hell feeling. It’s probably the main driver of scientific insight.”
I wasn’t any closer to knowing what I wanted to write in my essay, but I was intrigued by the idea of studying the Machines. As I wandered into the afternoon sun, I thought about all the possible timelines reshuffling in Tess’s wake. Was it a natural process that Tess could see because she used the Machines? Was she a tiny part of an unfathomably complex collective action that caused the shuffle? I wandered south toward Westwood, barely noticing as the hangar-sized campus buildings gave way to city streets. I passed a few bars and a Tower Records before finding myself at Falafel King, where I realized that I was incredibly hungry.
Falafel King served up the best pita sandwich in L.A., topped with crispy disks of potato and at least five kinds of spicy salad. As I ordered, I wondered with a twinge if I’d be able to afford this place once I was on financial aid.
All the tables in the restaurant were jammed, so I hunkered down on the warm sidewalk outside, watching a line of students waiting to order stoner fuel from Stan’s Donuts nearby. I was wiping some white sauce off my T-shirt when I heard a familiar voice.
“Hey, Beth?”
I looked up and immediately wished I wasn’t holding a messy sandwich that kept dripping tahini. “Hey, Hamid.” I scrambled up and surreptitiously wiped my hands on my jeans.
“Fancy meeting you here.” He had the same lopsided smile that made me want to kiss him, and I tried not to think about that as I twisted the edges of my sandwich wrapper.
“What are you up to?”
“Getting some donuts for my study group. Midterm madness.”
“Oh yeah? What class?”
“History of film.”
That was unexpected. “What happened to pre-med or business?”
“I keep forgetting to take classes in those.” He leaned easily against the wall and I realized he wasn’t exuding that melancholy neediness I remembered from high school. He seemed more stable. Happier.
“I’m getting ready for a midterm too. I have to write about collective action in history, but it turns out that nobody knows how history works.”
We started talking about the timeline, and the montage technique in film, and whether chocolate donuts were better than glazed. After I finished my pita, I decided to get a donut at Stan’s. Hamid said his study group was at the library, in the same general direction as the dorms, so it made sense to walk together back to campus.
“I’m glad I finally ran into you. I thought I would probably see you at some point.” Hamid ducked his head and looked embarrassed. “Not that I was hunting around for you or anything.”
“I’m glad we ran into each other too.”
“Hey, do you have… an e-mail address?” Hamid said the word “e-mail” like he was describing something extremely obscure and fancy.
“Of course. I got one on my first day of classes.”
“I just got one! I could send you my first e-mail!”
“Really? Your first e-mail? Didn’t your family have AOL?”
“I mean, I guess my sister had AOL. I never used it, though. It seemed like it was mostly for people talking about boy bands.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, allow me to introduce you to the wonders of e-mail. I’m elizabethc@magma.ucla.edu.”
“Easy to remember. I’ll mail you some electrons!” He gave me a quick hug and raced off in the direction of the library.
I stood there for a moment thinking about the hug, and what I wanted it to mean. Then I took the long way back to the dorms, puzzling over my essay for Anita. By the time I got back to my room, I was still unsure what to write. I knew history could be changed, but none of the hypotheses fit my own experience. Why wasn’t there a scientific theory that described how we change our own lives and the lives of our friends?
TWENTY-SEVEN
ANITA
Excerpted from the memoir of Anita Biswas, found in the Subalterns’ Archive Cave, Raqmu, Jordan (2030 C.E.)
There are some memories I will never share with the Daughters of Harriet, and this is one of them. I remember a nation without women’s suffrage. It’s where I grew up. As a little girl in Los Angeles in the 1970s, I was one of the lucky ones; Alta California gave us the vote a few years before I was born in 1968, and the UC system had been coed since the 1950s. When I was in middle school, my mother and I watched a soap opera called The Geologists every week because it had two African characters who traveled through the Machine at Timbuktu. Exposed to liberal ideas, treated to a college education, I had no doubt a woman like me could become a traveler. I landed a good position at Flin Flon. Then I spent my Long Four Years at a think tank called Past Engagements that provided evidence-based historical analysis to policymakers in Washington, D.C.
The first time I traveled, it was to Mississippi in the late 1860s. My assignment was simple: gather firsthand evidence for a lobbying group trying to prove that women’s suffrage movements are always doomed to fail.
My supervisor sent me to the period before the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified. This was during the bitter post–Civil War congressional debates over whether enfranchisement should extend to male former slaves, a subset of “educated” male former slaves, or both genders of all races. Conservatives were so angered by the process that they started defecting to the once-marginal Democratic Party, whose main platform was basically white nationalism. Lincoln’s Republicans were fearful of losing ground to Democrats in the South, so they hatched a desperate plan to make universal suffrage attractive to their dubious GOP brethren.
First, a group of Republican abolitionists persuaded the war hero and beloved cultural icon Harriet Tubman to run for U.S. Senator in Mississippi. Of course she couldn’t vote—and, therefore, couldn’t technically run for office. What she could do, however, was bring out huge crowds of women and ex-slaves at rallies and events where they filled out “provisional registration” forms as Republicans. The abolitionist Republicans were betting that activists in the South could get thousands of these people to fill out their forms. Behold: so many untapped voters, eager to toe the party line! It might persuade conservative members of the GOP to support universal suffrage. More Republican voters was a good thing, no matter how questionably human those voters might be.
I was the only Black person among the travelers at Past Engagements, so my supervisor decided I would be the ideal observer of this unique historical moment. “You’ll blend in. They’ll trust you,” he said. He didn’t understand that a mixed-race girl from California might have as little in common with a recently freed slave in Mississippi as he did. I couldn’t contradict him if I wanted this assignment, though, so I nodded and said nothing. Of course, I was right. During the six months I traveled, the activists kept asking me what I was. Sometimes the locals did too. Southerners were used to mixed-race people, because so many ex-slaves had white fathers, uncles, or grandfathers. But nobody had a father from India like I did.
I tagged along with a group of younger activists from New York, who treated me like their pet alien from the future. In late 1869 and early 1870, I took notes as they registered thousands of people in Mississippi, riding from town to town in a wagon with Harriet Tubman’s face painted on the side. Sadly, I did not get to meet the senatorial candidate herself; she was always campaigning or managing the elder care home for ex-slaves she’d founded outside Jackson.