And then I said the words I’d dreamed about for so long. “I remember a timeline where abortion was illegal.”
“So do I,” Anita said.
“Me too,” C.L. added.
“Holy shit.” Enid stared at us. “All of you remember a timeline where abortion was illegal in 2022?”
“It’s still technically not legal at the federal level. States have their own laws,” Shweta grumbled.
“But there’s no real enforcement,” Berenice noted. “And it’s only a couple of states.”
I spoke firmly. “It was illegal everywhere. All over the U.S.”
Morehshin broke in. “Women were dying. Men genetically engineered them to become breeders or workers. There was a whole biotech industry devoted to female containment and maintenance, and they had recently invented a way to replace a queen’s head with a—” She stopped abruptly when she noticed C.L.’s look of horror. “Sorry. I shouldn’t bring that up. That is not our timeline anymore. It is merely what I remember.”
Everyone fell into an awkward silence.
Anita popped open a bottle of sparkling pomegranate juice. “We won the edit war!”
“A toast to Harriet Tubman!”
“Long live her daughters!”
“And her mothers!”
“And her nonbinary kin!”
I stood up to raise a glass, felt a wrenching agony in my sinuses, and everything buzzed into dark static.
“Tess, I am taking you back to the Temple at Raqmu. I think Hugayr might know what to do.”
I was lying on Anita’s inflatable guest bed in her study. The lights were off, and I could see the last shreds of sunset through the window facing her garden. As long as I didn’t move a single muscle, the pain eased. But when I had to shift a little or stretch my neck to see something, it would all come roaring back. There was no point in arguing with Anita. I would do anything to stop feeling this way.
“Somebody will have to take over my lab. And finish teaching my class for this quarter.”
“Don’t worry about that yet. With any luck, we’ll be back in a few days.”
I slept most of the way to Raqmu, trying to outrun the agony with cannabis tinctures. We had to go through the Machine separately, and the only unburned time when we could arrive within minutes of each other was three years after we’d left Soph at the Temple.
It was my first trip since we’d shut down Elliot’s operation, and it was smooth. When I knelt to feel the water rise, there was a burst of humid air and the unmistakable smell of soil that had been chemically altered by plants and animals for millions of years. It was the planet I knew—the one with angiosperms and tetrapods and pterygota. The one where both land and water sustained life. I wondered how many times C.L. and their colleagues had gone back to repair the damage in the Ordovician, and if they’d learned more about the interface. I might never know.
When I emerged in 13 B.C.E., my entire body sang with relief. As an administrator from the Order noted my name and mark, I stretched my neck and arms to enjoy the tingle of motion without agony. I felt like myself again. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that my new self—whoever she turned out to be—didn’t hurt as much.
The temple was just as I remembered it, surrounded by a lush garden and artificial pools. A young adept brought Soph to meet me in the entrance hall, two scrolls and a writing box tucked under her arm.
“You caught me in the middle of afternoon study.” She smiled. Her hair was pinned up in the style of the late nineteenth century, and she wore the simple linen tunic preferred by most women who lived here. “Have you come to visit?”
“I’m meeting Anita. We need to talk to Hugayr about something that I’ve done to the timeline.”
Soph’s eyes widened but she said nothing. “I can take you to Hugayr’s office, but I have to warn you. She’s not in a good mood.”
I recalled how she ordered her students around and shrugged. “I’ve dealt with tenure committees, so I think I’m prepared.”
It had been three years for Soph, and only a few weeks for me, so we had a lot of asymmetric catching up to do. Now fluent in spoken Nabataean, Soph had made herself indispensable to the temple. She started by translating a few manuscripts, but quickly moved on to writing interpretive treatises about how the goddess should be honored in everyday life. Visiting scholars had copied her work to take back to their own libraries across the Mediterranean.
“It’s similar to what I wrote back in my present, but here they take it a lot more seriously.” She had a note of pride in her voice. “And it doesn’t get you sent to jail, which is nice.”
“I’m so glad we got you out of that shithole, Soph.”
She sighed. “I miss it, though. I miss Aseel and my other friends. I miss my parlors. I miss gin. I even miss the smell of the river!”
I put my arm around her and squeezed. “Aseel is doing great—she’s running Sol’s sheet music business. I’ve never seen her so happy. And busy!” Then I told her about the dance contest that changed the Comstock Laws, and Morehshin’s sister from the future, and how C.L. had data so good they were sure to get published in Nature Geoscience, or maybe Nature proper. It was a big breakthrough for understanding the origins of the interface. “We changed the timeline, you know. We won the edit war.”
Soph stopped me on the threshold of the chamber with the three-faced goddess statue. “One thing I’ve learned while studying here, Tess. There is no end to the edit war, and we can never claim victory. The timeline is always changing. So are we. I think perhaps… all we can hope for are small mercies. One life spared. One good deed. Do you understand?”
I searched the pale blue of her eyes, wondering if she knew more than she let on. “Anita always says that small things change, and big things don’t.”
“She’s right.”
When we knocked on Hugayr’s office door, one of her students opened it right away. Over her shoulder, I could see that Anita was already there, deep in conversation.
“Oh hello, come in!” Hugayr gestured us to some cushions around a small table made from bronze and wood. Then she glared at the student. “You—bring us some beer, and then get back to work on your manuscript. It’s showing some promise.”
The student hurtled out of the room, a tiny smile of accomplishment on their face, and returned with ceramic mugs of a foamy drink that smelled like barley and pepper. I sipped experimentally. Didn’t taste exactly like beer from my present, but close enough.
Hugayr put her mug down. “Tess, I have already told Anita. You can’t go home. It will kill you.”
I panicked, overwhelmed. “There’s nothing we can do?”
“We have other Timeless here who have experienced the same thing. When you edit your own life, it can be very painful. Not for everyone. Some people—they do an edit, get their loved one back, and live happily ever after. Some people feel only a little discomfort and then it goes away. But you are one of those unfortunate people who is completely fucked.”
“Why me? All I did was bring a loved one back, like you said.”
Hugayr wore a dubious expression. “Anita told me what you did. You created a highly divergent timeline. You edited your entire adult life all at once. Of course it made you sick. Didn’t you think about that before you did it?”
“Well, yeah… but it seemed like it was going okay until…”
“Until the edit actually took?”
I picked at a sliver of wood on the table leg. “I don’t get it. That was supposed to be a small change. But we made a huge change to women’s rights and abortion law, and nobody else is sick. Shouldn’t that have changed all our lives profoundly?”