She is one of a band of people. They work with lightning and metal, with light and time. They bend the air and the earth to open doors that have never been opened. They journey to yesterday. To the time of heroes.
“She’s a woman,” I say.
“It’s like a sci fi fantasy story,” Steve says.
I already know that. Malni has been telling everyone, she’s from here. When I read those words, that they journeyed to yesterday, I figured that plus the Old English meant that somehow Malni thought she had gone to the past.
“Have you heard about anybody who had some kind of breakdown or disappeared in the last year? You know, a teacher? Someone good at Old English?”
“No?” he says.
I tell him a little bit about Malni.
“Wow. That’s… wow. You’d think someone this good would be teaching and yeah, it’s a pretty small discipline. I’d think I’d have heard,” he says. “Maybe not. If I hear anything…”
“So she’s really good,” I prompt.
“There are only something like a little over four hundred works of Old English still around,” Steve says. “There’s Beowulf, which was written down by a monk. There’s Caedmon, and Alfred the Great and Bede, a bunch of Saints’ lives and some riddles and some other stuff. You get to know the styles. The dialects. This is close to Alfred but different. I thought at first that the differences were because she was trying to mimic Alfred but getting it a little wrong, you know? But the more I read it over and over, the more I realize that it’s all internally consistent.”
“Like she’s really good at making it up?”
“Yeah,” Steve says. “Like she’s made a version all her own. Invented a wholly new version of Old English so that it would sound like a different person at close to the same time. And written a story in it. That’s a really weird thing to do. Make it super authentic for somebody like me. Because the number of people who could read this and get what she’s doing and also enjoy it is zero.”
“Zero?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I understand the beginning of the story, I think. It’s a time travel story. She starts in Los Angeles, which, by the way, is really hard to describe in Anglo-Saxon because she doesn’t try to make up words like horseless cart or anything. For one thing, Anglo-Saxon doesn’t really work that way. So she starts here and she travels back in time. Then there’s this part about being in the past in what I think is probably Wessex, you know, what’s now part of England. She makes up some stuff that’s different from the historical record, some of which I wish was true because it’s really cool and some of which is just kind of dull unless you’re really into agriculture. Then there’s this long explanation of something I don’t understand because I think she’s trying to explain math but it isn’t like math like I understand math. But really, I suck at math so maybe it is.”
“She’s got math in there?”
“A little bit, but mostly she’s explaining it. There’s something about how really small changes in a stream make waves and if you drop a stick in the water, no one can predict its course. How when you walk through the door to yesterday, it means yesterday is not your yesterday. Then she talks about coming back to her beautiful city but it’s gone. There’s a strange city in its place. That city is beautiful, too and it’s full of wild men and sad women. That city has savage and beautiful art. It has different things. Some are better and some are worse but her family is gone and no one speaks to her anymore. She says the story is about the cost of the journey. That when you journey to yesterday, you lay waste to today. When you return, your today is gone and it is a today that belongs to somebody else.”
It takes me a moment to think about all that.
One of the baristas steams milk. Starbucks is playing some soft spoken music in the background. It doesn’t feel like someone has just explained how to end my world.
“It’s kind of creepy but the way it’s written there are big chunks that are really hard to read,” Steve says. “Is she crazy? I mean, what’s the deal?”
I want to say she’s crazy. Really, it’s the best explanation, right? She was a professor of Anglo Saxon/Old English. She’d had a psychotic break. Sherri said a man who looked a lot like her—maybe a family member, a brother—tracked her down to the halfway house and took her home.
That strange and liquid language she speaks. The way she acts, as if she comes from a different culture where the men are not so savage and the women not so sad.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I can give you what I’ve translated. I’ve translated all the words but there are parts that don’t make sense,” Steve says.
I pay him the rest and add enough to make a thousand. He’s spent a lot of time on it. Time he could have been working on his dissertation.
“I actually learned a lot,” he says. “It’s like she really speaks Anglo Saxon.”
“Maybe she did,” I say.
Someone, somewhere is working on time travel. I mean, someone has to be. People are trying to clone mammoths. People are working on interstellar travel. I have a Google alert for it and mostly what pops up is fiction. Sometimes crazy pseudo science. Real stuff, too. I get alerts for things like photon entanglement. People are trying.
I think I saw Malni on Wilshire Boulevard one time walking with two other people; a man who looked like her and a woman who had black hair. I was driving, late for an appointment. By the time I saw them I was almost past them. I tried to go around the block and catch them but traffic was bad and by the time I got back to Wilshire they were gone. Or maybe it wasn’t Malni.
Maybe in some lab somewhere, people are close to a time travel breakthrough. I walk downtown with Matt and I think, this might be the last moment I walk with Matt. Someone might be sent back in time at any moment and this will all disappear.
Will it all disappear at once? Will I have a moment to feel it fading away? Will I be able to grip Matt’s arm? To know?
There are two guys walking towards us as we head to the Mexican place. I’m going to have a margarita. Maybe two. I’m going to get a little drunk with Matt. I’m going to talk too much if I want to. The guys are not paying attention. I remember Malni. I throw my shoulders back a little. I do not smile. I look in the face of the one in my way. The world is going to end, you fucker. I will not give up this sidewalk with my love.
He steps a little to the side. He gives way.
Nexus
MICHAEL F. FLYNN
Michael Flynn began selling science fiction in 1984 with the short story “Slan Libh.” His first novel, In the Country of the Blind, appeared in 1990. He has since sold seventy or more stories to Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere, and he has been nominated several times for the Hugo Award. He is best known for the Hugo-nominated Eifelheim and the Spiral Arm series: The January Dancer, Up Jim River, In the Lion’s Mouth, and On the Razor’s Edge. His other books include Fallen Angels, a novel written in collaboration with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Firestar, Rogue Star, Lodestar, Falling Star, and The Wreck of the River of Stars. His stories have been collected in The Forest of Time and Other Stories and The Nanotech Chronicles. He has received the Robert A. Heinlein Award for his body of work and the Theodore Sturgeon Award for the story “House of Dreams.” In addition, he has received the Seiun Award from Japan and the Prix Julia-Verlanger from France, both for translations of Eifelheim. His most recent book is the collection Captive Dreams, which contains six stories dealing with issues of morality and technology. He is currently working on a novel, The Shipwrecks of Time, set in the alien world of 1965. He lives in Easton, Pennsylvania.