She gives me a resigned look but doesn’t say anything.
“Did you just wake up?” I ask.
Katherine nods and then crosses over to grab the kettle from the stove. “These new medications tend to make me sleepy in fits and spurts during the day. Then I’m awake half the night. How was school?”
I groan and shake my head. “We now get the Cyrist Creed along with the Pledge of Allegiance and Cyrist teachers along with our regular teachers. No holding hands in the hallway and a new dress code. My outfit for the Expo showed more skin. We have until next Monday to comply, but I’m not ordering it. If this isn’t over before then, you and Dad can homeschool me. It’s bad enough to be stuck in a uniform, but the boys’ uniform doesn’t change at all. What’s with the Cyrist focus on female chastity? I mean, according to Adrienne, Saul wasn’t exactly a prude.” In fact, Adrienne told me pretty much the opposite, noting that Saul tried to sleep with almost every female at CHRONOS, but Katherine’s expression suggests I might want to skip the specifics.
“No,” she says, “but he wouldn’t be the first to decide that rules of behavior should be stricter once they no longer affect him personally. We have plenty of that type in public office today. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the result of co-opting so many different religions. Like any partnership, each group has to compromise a few things when they merge.”
The image of our new Purple Pigeon mascot pops into my head, which makes me think of homeroom and the Cyrist teacher who handed out the folder. “I didn’t realize until today that the Cyrist men have a blue lotus tattoo, instead of pink. How cliché.”
Katherine chuckles silently. “That’s been true since the Cyrists started the whole tattoo thing back in the 1600s. Saul was not a gender historian, so he obviously assumed that was the natural order of things—pink for girls, blue for boys—since there are still remnants of that in the future. But it’s a much more recent custom. In the timeline before Saul inserted his Cyrists, pink wasn’t associated with girls until the 1940s. I don’t know why they even use the tattoos for males. The whole chastity thing for them is sort of wink-wink, anyway—a token nod to gender equality.”
She sits down next to me and dips her tea bag up and down in the water, a reflective look on her face. “But . . . I don’t think the choice of values the Cyrists adopted was entirely coincidental. Looking back, Saul was always a bit . . . misogynistic. He’d make comments about the good old days when men were men and women knew their place. About how it was natural for the stronger to rule. He didn’t care for my counterargument that there are different kinds of strength, that in a civilized world, upper-body strength isn’t all that relevant. We’d always pretend it was a joke, but even then I knew there was a bit of truth under the banter.”
“So . . . how would Saul have felt about having to rely on Prudence to set up Cyrist International? About sharing power?”
“He would hate it. And he’d fight it, especially if he thought Prudence was developing a following. Saul never cared for anything that took the focus away from him.”
“And Prudence does precisely that. She’s the human ‘face’ of the Cyrists. When I was at the temple in the other timeline, Charlayne said that few people had seen Saul but many had seen Prudence—and she always looks the same, eternal. That makes sense, because only those with the CHRONOS gene can go forward to see Saul, but Prudence sometimes appears in front of entire congregations. So it makes sense that Saul would push all of this weaker-vessel crap—he wants them to see her as his subordinate.”
Katherine shakes her head. “I just wish I could talk with Prudence. That she’d speak to me. I find it hard to believe she’s willing to help Saul in this Culling thing. Prudence could be a difficult child, but she and Deborah were both very compassionate. They’d pull the last coin out of their pockets if they saw a beggar on the streets. Prudence once saved her allowance for an entire year to give to this international children’s group that came to their school. I can’t fathom how she could change so much.”
“Well, Kiernan did say she was different when she was younger, before her mind became all muddled. Apparently, Saul has a very convincing . . . I guess you’d call it a demo reel for future events. Kiernan said Simon took him around to select locations—wars, famines, environmental devastation—and he said those sights made it easy to believe that the future needed changing. Maybe Saul showed the same things to Prudence when she found him?”
“Maybe. There are certainly plenty of examples to choose from, both in this century and the next. But things do get better. Most of the environmental problems have been addressed. Famine isn’t a problem in my time—truthfully, it wouldn’t be a problem now if we had the political will to address it. Political conflicts still happen, but they’re rarely armed conflicts. Those are on the decline now, compared to the rest of history, although people don’t seem to believe it. The 2300s are not utopian, but . . . they’re a vast improvement over the present. I think you’d agree if you could see it.”
“So why aren’t there any stable points after . . . 2150, I think it is?”
“Well, for one thing, we have solid documentary evidence of most events we’d want to view after that point. But I think the more important reason is that’s when the mechanism we use for time travel was invented. The cutoff prevented us from going back and tweaking things that affected our personal lives and from going back and uninventing CHRONOS, I guess.”
I snort. “Uninventing CHRONOS sounds pretty good to me right now. What I don’t get, if things are really okay like you’re saying, is why Saul and these Objectivists wanted change.”
“You’ll always have discontents in any system, Kate. Some people feel they’re being oppressed or held back, even if they have everything they need or everything that a reasonable person could want. Some people always want more.”
She takes a sip of her tea. “Everyone knew that the Objectivists argued that CHRONOS technology wasn’t being used to its full potential, but it seemed like . . . I don’t know, an academic exercise, maybe? An ongoing esoteric debate. Only a handful of the DC-area Objectivists had any connection to CHRONOS. I attended a few functions with Saul but stopped going, because I didn’t like the way he acted around them. He seemed like a different person, especially when Campbell, the group’s leader, was around. Campbell was a nasty man, but to his credit, he opposed Saul’s ideas on using religion as a tool for shaping history.”
“He didn’t think it would work?”
“I don’t know whether he thought it would work or not, but he thought it was a bad idea. He once poked fun at Saul and said that increasing the role of religion in society would make things worse, not better. Saul said that depended on the religion, and they went back and forth. Like everyone else, I tuned it out, assuming it was a pointless, ongoing argument between two—what’s the word they’re using these days? Frenemies? I never thought . . .”
Her voice is small and sad. And as I watch her staring into her cup of tea, I realize she looks old. Old and weak and very ill. I’ve never known Katherine when she wasn’t terminally ill, but despite that, she’s always seemed strong to me. Forceful. That’s certainly how Mom thinks of her—a force of nature you encounter at your peril.
The woman I met at the Expo also seemed strong. She was good at her job, poised, and self-assured. But somewhere in that mix was the fragile, insecure young woman I saw in her diaries, a girl so in love that she ignored the signs that the man was a psychopath. And now she blames herself for not knowing, not realizing, not having the strength to ask the hard questions about Saul before it was too late.
Just like I’m going to blame myself if I can’t set things right before she dies.