“What is abortion?” Hugayr glanced at Soph for clarification.
“Ending a pregnancy.”
“I see. You changed some laws made by men. Yes. Did you change any women’s lives?”
“I guess… I changed Beth’s life.”
Anita scratched her head. “We changed Kitty’s life, I think.”
“Did either of those women’s lives change specifically because of what you did to men’s law?”
“They were two of the millions of women whose lives were changed. Reproductive rights improve our choices, give us freedom, allow us to follow new paths… it was a profound alteration of history.” I trailed off when Hugayr gave me the frown she usually reserved for students.
“Think. Why would you feel a big change less than a small one?”
I thought about all those people linking arms to protest Comstock at the Expo, the dancers at Sherry’s, Sol’s strategic carnival wisdom, and the Four Hundred on their thrones. “It was collective action. So many of us worked to change the laws that the effects are spread out and attenuated. I guess all of us feel it a tiny bit. But with Beth… that was something small I changed for myself alone.”
“When we say small things change, we do not mean that they are insignificant.”
I took a long swig of beer to drown the lump in my throat. “I guess I’m staying here, then.” The realization was bittersweet: I would miss the twenty-first century, but I felt at home here in ways I couldn’t entirely explain.
“My chambers are comfortable.” Soph touched my shoulder, and my heart skipped a beat. “You can stay with me for a while if you want.”
“You can be our next sacrifice!” Hugayr made it sound completely decided. She pulled out a scroll and flattened it in her lap. “Let’s figure out a job you could do as a member of the Timeless. How about… scribe? Gardener? Engineer? Assassin?”
“Wait, what? You have assassins?”
Hugayr looked concerned and showed Soph the scroll, written in Nabataean. “Did I translate that right?”
Soph squinted and made a seesaw wiggle with her hand. “You could perhaps say ‘killer’ or ‘defender’? But I think ‘assassin’ is probably the best word.”
I could still feel the weight of Elliot’s sword in my hands, and the way I’d known exactly how to sever his spine. Maybe that was why I belonged in the first century B.C.E. In Nabataean, there was a word for what I did best. There was actually a job that combined my skills as an academic and a murderer.
“I think I’d like to be an assassin.”
Hugayr smiled. “Great! We’ve really been needing one. Let’s schedule your sacrifice.”
HISTORICAL SOURCES:
A GUIDE
As you may have noticed, this book is an alternate history. But many of the events and people in it are based on ones that existed in our timeline. Here is a comprehensive list of facts and sources for anyone who wants to see how deep the wormhole goes.
The Ordovician period—which witnessed the biggest diversification of life on our planet—did end with a disaster that killed over 75 percent of all life on Earth. Two ice ages hit the planet in rapid succession (at least in geological time), turning those lush coastal ecosystems to ice. Nobody knows for sure how it happened, but physicist Adrian Melott and his colleagues have suggested a gamma ray burst (https://www.nature.com/news/2003/030922/full/news030922-7.html).
Before the United States took control of California, the state was part of the Las Californias province, divided into Alta California to the north and Baja California to the south. First it was owned by Spain, then by Mexico. After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, Alta California was claimed by the United States and became a state in the union in 1850. Baja California was claimed by Mexico.
Flin Flon is an actual city on the border between Manitoba and Saskatchewan. After discovering copper there, a prospector named the city after a character in a pulp sci-fi novel he was reading, The Sunless City by J.E. Preston Muddock.
Harriet Tubman was a Civil War hero, leader of the underground railroad, activist, and escaped slave who almost certainly would have been elected to the Senate had women been given the vote at the same time freed slaves were. But in our timeline, she had to petition the government to receive the same pension granted to any man who fought in the Civil War as she had. After the Civil War, she lived in New York, where she ran one of the nation’s first elder care homes for African Americans. You can learn more about her extraordinary life in historian Catherine Clinton’s biography, Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.
The abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements—connected before the Civil War—were driven apart when women were not given the vote at the same time freedmen were. During Reconstruction, the Democratic Party emerged as a white nationalist alternative to Lincoln’s anti-slavery Republican Party. Republicans deliberately ran black candidates for office in the South to capture the votes of recently enfranchised freedmen. Eventually, the South went Democratic, and stayed that way until the mid-twentieth century. You can read more about the Democratic Party’s origin story in Bruce Bartlett’s Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past.
During the Haitian Revolution, a highly successful slave rebellion overthrew the French colonial government and left freed slaves and free people of color in charge of the nation. The French government insisted that Haiti pay steep reparations for “stealing” its slaves and plantations, thus destabilizing the burgeoning nation’s economy for decades to come. For more about this revolution, along with historical documents from the period, see Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804. Dubois has also written a popular history of the revolution called Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.
Anthony Comstock was appointed a “special agent” with the U.S. Postal Service, where his job was to open mail and hunt for obscene materials. He cemented his power by bringing a trunk full of nude postcards, novelty items, and rubber dildos that he had ordered through the mails to a congressional hearing, where he demonstrated how widespread the moral menace of obscenity was. His activism with the YMCA and citizen’s arrests of abortionists and sex educators made changes to U.S. obscenity laws that lasted almost a century. As a result of his work, any information about contraception and abortion was defined by the courts as obscene, and therefore illegal. He bragged in public speeches that his work had driven many women to suicide, and he was right. I learned a lot about Comstock’s life and legal battles from Amy Werbel’s incredible book Lust on Triaclass="underline" Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock. I also took some of Comstock’s dialogue from his writing collected in Robert Bremner’s edition of Comstock’s 1883 book Traps for the Young.
Comstock’s persecution (and prosecution) led Spiritualist and women’s health advocate Ida Craddock to commit suicide in 1902. The character of Sophronia (Soph) is an homage to Ida, who was arrested after publishing a book about having very explicit sex with an angel named Soph. Though First Amendment lawyers (including Clarence Darrow) worked pro bono to argue Ida’s case, she was convicted of obscenity and sentenced to a lengthy jail term. Rather than go to prison, she killed herself. Ida also published an impassioned essay defending the sanctity of the danse du ventre on the Midway, which is how her work first came to Comstock’s attention. You can read Craddock’s work, including her essay on the danse du ventre, in Vere Chappell’s collection of her writing, Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock.