I swallowed hard. “Yes. I’m ready.”
THIRTY
TESS
Raqmu, Ottoman-occupied territory (1894 C.E.)… Western Gondwana Coast (447.1 mya)
I was relieved to be back in Raqmu after a month at sea and on trains. There were more established commercial routes to Raqmu than there were to Flin Flon, but nineteenth-century travel was always exhausting. Morehshin and I settled into the rooms Anita had kept in the scholars’ quarter during our absence, and I made some muddy, rich coffee for Anita and me while Morehshin rained a small lunch out of her multi-tool. Suddenly, C.L. burst through the door. “I’m glad you’re back because I’ve done another analysis, and we are in deep shit.”
C.L. had dyed their hair bright green, to match their nails. They looked older.
Anita was surprised. “How long have you been working on this?”
They scratched behind an ear. “I got an extension on my field season work, so I guess about a year in travel time, give or take. Mostly in the past. But I am about a month ahead of you in the present. I had to go back once in a while to use the computer cluster in the geology lab. Sorry about that.”
That wasn’t too bad; it meant we had to avoid them for our first month back, to prevent merging conflicts.
“What did you find?” Morehshin asked.
“They are very close to wrecking the mechanism that keeps the wormholes open on both ends. I have the data right here.” C.L. patted their chest.
“You memorized it?”
“No, of course not. That’s insane. I uploaded it to my shirt.”
Now Morehshin was excited. “You figured out an interface hack!”
C.L. beamed. “That’s right. There’s no way to bring tools or computers through the time machine, right? The interface only permits clothing and implants. That’s how Morehshin brought the multi-tool—she can absorb it into her body. At least, that’s my hypothesis.”
“You’re right.” Morehshin opened her hand and the multi-tool emerged from it, growing like a bubble in tar before taking on solid form. I had no idea she could do that.
C.L. continued their infodump. “So I have a friend who got me this prototype of a smart shirt that Alphabet is making—basically there are wires woven into the fabric, connecting the CPU and sensors and memory, so it’s part of my clothing. All I have to do is output to a mobile device, which is why I got this implant.” C.L. tapped their eyebrow. “I can save all my data and read it locally using ultra-wideband. The cool part is that it’s great for fieldwork anywhere, not just during time travel, right? I’m going to use it for this project I’m doing with carbon dioxide in Antarctic meltwater because my shirt runs Fuchsia OS, and one of my labmates wrote a great API for gas chromatographs. Hey, did you guys know I finally got a National Science Foundation grant for that? It’s going to be—”
Anita waved her hands. “Okay, okay, C.L.—we can talk about your funding later. Get to the point.”
“Right. I’ve been taking photonic matter levels on the Machine at several critical points in the timeline. Each change is registered instantly on the other Machines, as far as I’ve been able to determine. So that hypothesis about how Raqmu affects the other Machines—my data suggests it’s correct. There’s a very real possibility that destroying the machine at Raqmu will destroy time travel completely.”
“Oh shit.”
“Also I figured out what the Comstockers are trying to do. I traveled closer to the divergence and found a campsite with a stone forge. They’re making steel blades to re-create a part of the old interface controls, from when the Machines had a console with buttons. That’s why they’re randomly cutting into it—to activate a trigger. Basically, there’s a setting that decouples the interface from the wormhole. Probably for maintenance or something. Anyway, the result is you’ve got a wormhole and an interface, but they don’t connect.”
“And where does the smelting come in?” My head was exploding from all this news on top of my migraine, but thankfully C.L. liked to explain everything.
“You need a metal alloy to unlock it. After I saw Morehshin use her multi-tool on the canopy, I realized we’d been using the wrong tools. I mean, not simply the wrong tools, but also in the wrong places. The interface isn’t gone; it’s more like the user-friendly part of it eroded away. Like when you wear the letters and numbers off an old keyboard. You can still type, but finding the right button is a crapshoot. Except this isn’t a keyboard—it’s an incredibly complicated mechanism that controls physical properties of the universe that we don’t yet have names for. I was thinking that maybe the Machines aren’t really for time travel—”
Morehshin cut them off. “Obviously they haven’t found a decoupling switch yet. Neither have we, in my time. But they are getting somewhere. That time when we landed in the Ordovician—the reboot fixed it then, but I don’t think that will keep working much longer.”
“It won’t,” C.L. confirmed. “Photonic matter emissions are through the floor.”
“Why do these anti-travelers have to go back at all?” I wondered. “Can’t they destroy the interface from their present?”
C.L. sighed in exasperation. “Tess, he has to go back to a period when the interface was still visible, but not underwater, so he can mess around without drowning. So basically that’s the Hirnantian. You know—right before the gamma ray burst that scoured the Earth’s surface, causing a rapid-onset ice age that killed millions of species in the ocean?”
Anita was nodding as if that explained everything. “It makes sense.”
“So what do we do when we tap back?” I looked from Morehshin and C.L. to Anita. “We don’t know how many of them there are.”
“I have an idea.” Morehshin had a smug tone.
“What’s that?”
“Go back and kill him. Like Hugayr told us.”
“First of all, no, we aren’t killing anyone.” My voice wobbled as I tried to convince myself. “And second, who is ‘him’?”
“They don’t know how to send multiple people through at once,” C.L. broke in. “It’s probably only one going back. Maybe two at most.”
“Couldn’t we overpower him and drag him back up to 2022?” I was getting desperate. “Sabotaging the Machine is illegal, and C.L. has digital evidence of what he’s done.”
Anita was dubious. “Do you really think the Academy would buy it? I think at most they’d send him back up to his time.”
“I could take him back to his time,” Morehshin said reluctantly. “What he’s doing is still a crime in the Esteele Era. It was one of the last American democracies before the hives.”
C.L. perked up. “Would you do that? I could leave evidence for you in the subalterns’ cave.”
“How can we be sure you won’t kill him?” I asked.
“You can’t. But you can be sure he will kill us and our daughters if we do nothing.”
“All right.” I nodded. “We’ll go back and make a… citizen’s arrest. We can knock him out or immobilize him, and tap you guys back up.”
“Are you still prepared for this to be a one-way trip?” Morehshin was grim.
I thought about Beth and Soph, both alive; and I imagined Aseel, using the music business to make the world safe for women’s bodies. My neck was a burning knot of pain. There was nothing left for me here, but there were billions of other people who needed the Machines to keep our histories open to revision. I nodded at Morehshin. “We’ve already talked about the risks.”
C.L. and Anita nodded too.
We walked to the AGU together. Luckily one of Anita’s students was scheduling slots on the Machine, putting in her Long Four Years, and she got us in quickly. As we left, she bowed slightly and whispered, “Safe travels, Daughters.”