When thirty-six seconds have elapsed by the Western count, the time machine reappears between Nagkmur and Zendahl, leaving Annie isolated in the backfield. Expanding from a singularity, it pushes Zendahl and Janet backward with a great rush of air. Janet loses her balance and falls on her backside. Zendahl keeps his feet and rushes around to the rear of the time machine (unless it is the front), but halts when he realizes what has happened.
Though buffeted by the displaced air, Annie is faster and very nearly lays a hand on Nagkmur when the door opens.
And Nagkmur staggers to a halt before his time machine.
It is not his time machine.
For one thing it is larger and ovoid rather than boxy. It is lime green rather than dull gray, and there is a faintly iridescent and baroque design visible on its surface. From the now-open doorway steps a tall, brown man wearing a close-fitting uniform. He is rugged and handsome, godlike in appearance. His gaze passes over Zendahl, Stacey, Annie Troy, and Janet (who has come around to the other end of the machine) until it comes to rest on Siddhar Nagkmur, and he smiles.
“Shennö Nagkmur,” he says, “it is my unhappy lot to arrest you for attempted chronocide.”
It makes sense in a mad sort of way. If Nagkmur’s “original” continuum had developed a Patrol to safeguard its timeline, why should the altered continuum not give birth to another. Nature keeps no secrets and what the sages of the Thirty-seventh Mandate had discovered, the physicists of the Forty-first Century could learn as well. And the Department of Chronic Integrity would spend as much energy safeguarding the overwrite as Nagkmur’s Shy?n Baw spent maintaining the original—if it really had been the original.
The man from the machine calls himself Dace X, which is as fine-sounding a futuristic name as anyone could ask. As Time Warden for Epoch 19/23, he is charged with confiscating Nagkmur’s machine, and stopping his machinations.
“But my error create your time stream,” Nagkmur protests. He squats in misery beside the awesome time cruiser from which Dace X has emerged. “You are mistakes, errors, all of you. You preserve defect, not correct it.”
Dace X looks thoughtful. “That depends,” he drawls, “on which side o’ the error yuh sit, don’t it?” He takes Nagkmur by the arm and raises him to his feet.
“What would you have done in my place?” the Patrolman asks the Warden. Failure chokes his voice.
“Oh, same-o, same-o, I ’spect,” is the breezy reply. “But there’s no way, Jose, to get back your family.”
“If I correct original error…” says Nagkmur.
Dace X shakes his head. “Repair jobs are never quite the same as the original make. It’d be a patch job. But you haven’t lost them. They’ve lost you. Your home is still ‘there,’ in another branch of space-time. But you just can’t get there from here.”
Nagkmur struggles for his voice. “They, they still live? Truly?”
“Certainly. You can’t overwrite time. You simply create another branch of it.”
Janet knows from his thoughts that Dace X is lying like a rug. Nagkmur’s people are less than ghosts, for a ghost must once have lived. But she also senses an effort on the Warden’s part to comfort the Patrolman. After all, you cannot atone for wiping out a few billion people by wiping out another few billion.
“Your arrival was quite timely,” Annie Troy points out. “How did you pinpoint this time and place so exactly?”
The man from the future grins. “No sweat, daddy-o. Nagkmur will tell us during his debriefing. We just have to make sure he does that before I get my work order.”
“That all seems rather circular,” Annie says, for the claim has offended her sense of causality.
But Dace X merely shrugs. “That’s one way to avoid loose ends. Anyhow, we had to wait until after you guys beat the alien. That reminds me, which of you…?” He looks around and spots Colonel Zendahl. “I have this for you.”
He pulls a SIG Sauer P228 from a dispatch case worn over his shoulder and hands it to the officer. “If you would hand me your old weapon, I’ll drop it in the gun shop in Boise where I got this one. Make sure the records are properly altered in the Air Force data base.” He hands a five-inch floppy to Annie Troy, who stares at it in incomprehension. Dace X says, “Oops,” and replaces it with a thumb drive. “Sorry, wrong mission. Well, that’s it. Twenty-three skidoo, as you people say.”
Annie Troy shakes her head. “How did you know any of this was going down? Did you detect Nagkmur’s, uh, ‘time vortex’?”
When Dace X shakes his head, Annie presses her question. “I don’t care how circular your causes are. Anything that moves is moved by another. How did you know any of this happened?”
Dace X returned to his machine, shepherding Nagkmur before him. He paused in the doorway. “We acted on an anonymous tip in the thirty-fourth century.”
But whence the tip, who could say. Janet looks about the deserted plant but, expert as she is at passing unnoticed by the shadows around her, Stacey has already slipped away and has blended into the anonymous masses, beyond the range of Janet’s talents.
On 7 February 2016, a bus driver named Kamraj was struck and killed by a meteorite on the campus of Bharathidasan Engineering College in Vellore, Tamil Nadu State. Scientists and media marveled at the unlikeliness of the event and said he was killed by mere chance. But Kamraj was not killed by chance, he was killed by a meteorite. Chance is not a cause, even if she strikes like a hammer.
Causation is vertical, not horizontal. That is, there is a cause for your flat tire and a cause for the moon being in quarter phase; but for getting a flat tire while the moon is in quarter phase, seek no cause. That way lies madness. Or astrology.
Coincidence, they say, makes bad art. But art imitates life, not the other way round, and life is a succession of such coincidences, great and small. If Stacey had not saved that baby, she would not have been on the news. If Nagkmur had not been drowning his sorrows, he would not have seen her. If he had not seen her, he would not have fired up the ol’ temporal precessor. If he hadn’t done that, Jim-7 would not have burst from cover and so garnered the attention of the Apkallu League. And so it goes tumbling down time to the dénouement. Jim-7 might not have rushed so precipitously to his fatal contact had Nagkmur not stepped aside. And the Patrolman stepped aside because he realized the alien’s probable sensitivity to electrical shock from Zendahl’s experience with its mild Tazer. Because Annie, lacking all feeling, noted the nature of the fear that gripped them all, Stacey gripped her knives instead, attacked the creature, and by her apparent willingness to die steeled Nagkmur to defend a continuum in which he did not believe, much as Theodora the actress once steeled the purpose of the basileus Justinian in a golden city once upon a time.
Honorable Mentions: 2017
Daniel Abraham, “The Mocking Tower,” The Book of Swords.
Tim Akers, “A Death in the Wayward Drift,” Interzone 269.
Nina Allen, “Neptune’s Trident,” Clarkesworld, June.
Charlie Jane Anders, “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime,” Cosmic Powers.
________, “Cake Baby: A Kango and Sharon Adventure,” Lightspeed, November.
________, “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” Global Dystopias.
________, “Stochastic Fancy,” Wired: The Fiction Issue.