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    Time Travel: Recent Trips
    Time Travel: Recent Trips
    Time Travel: Recent Trips
    Ebook562 pages9 hours

    Time Travel: Recent Trips

    By Paula Guran

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The idea of time travel has been with us since ancient times; now, the concept of time travel seems almost . . . plausible. Today, tales of chrononauts are more imaginative and thought-provoking than ever before: new views, cutting-edge concepts, radical notions of paradox and possibility—state-of-the-art speculative stories collected from those written in the twenty-first century. Forward to the past, back to the future—get ready for a fascinating trip!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrime Books
    Release dateOct 16, 2014
    ISBN9781607014393
    Time Travel: Recent Trips

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    • 4/5
      This quite enjoyable anthology compiles eighteen time-travel stories published between 2005 and 2014, mostly by well-known authors (there were only a couple that were new to me) and with a mixture of well-known stories and more unknown ones. As it’s to be expected in this kind of book, I didn’t love every story, but I think Paula Guran has made quite a good job, choosing stories ranging from decent to excellent. The approach to the common time-travelling subject was varied enough to avoid repetition among them, although I think that this one, as any thematic anthology, is better enjoyed if read one or two stories at a time, instead of reading the whole book from beginning to end. The stand-outs for me were the touching Kage Baker’s “The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park” and, most of all, the harrowing but brilliant novella “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary”, by Ken Liu.Overall, a solid selection of time-travel stories that, as the scientific details of time-travel are secondary in most of the stories, can be enjoyed by science fiction and non-science fiction fans alike.

    Book preview

    Time Travel - Paula Guran

    TIME TRAVEL:

    RECENT TRIPS

    PAULA GURAN

    For Ann VanderMeer—

    with special thanks for pointing out a couple of these.

    Copyright © 2014 by Paula Guran.

    Cover art by Julie Dillon.

    Cover design by Sherin Nicole.

    Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

    All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission.

    ISBN: 978-1-60701-439-3 (ebook)

    ISBN: 978-1-60701-434-8 (trade paperback)

    PRIME BOOKS

    Germantown, MD

    www.prime-books.com

    No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

    For more information, contact Prime Books at [email protected].

    CONTENTS

    Time Travel Orientation by Paula Guran

    With Fate Conspire by Vandana Singh

    Twember by Steve Rasnic Tem

    The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary by Ken Liu

    The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park by Kage Baker

    Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous by Dale Bailey

    Blue Ink by Yoon Ha Lee

    Two Shots from Fly’s Photo Gallery by John Shirley

    The Mists of Time by Tom Purdom

    The King of Where-I-Go by Howard Waldrop

    Bespoke by Genevieve Valentine

    First Flight by Mary Robinette Kowal

    The Time Travel Club by Charlie Jane Anders

    The Ghosts of Christmas by Paul Cornell

    The Ile of Dogges by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette

    September at Wall and Broad by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

    Thought Experiment by Eileen Gunn

    Number 73 Glad Avenue by Suzanne J. Willis

    The Lost Canal by Michael Moorcock

    About the Authors

    Acknowledgments

    TIME TRAVEL ORIENTATION

    Paula Guran

    Welcome to the twenty-first century, chrononaut! The stories collected herein were all originally published within the last decade (2005–2014 CE) and reflect what early-twenty-first-century short-form fictioneers imagine (or perhaps know/knew/will know) concerning time travel.

    Despite my claim on the back cover, I’m not really sure humankind has always been fascinated with the idea of time travel. The desire to go backward to an earlier era or forward to a future date—or even travel to an alternate timeline—probably requires that one (at least initially) consider time as more or less linear.

    Although the subject is currently debated among Egyptologists, there is a school of thought positing that ancient Egyptians considered time as measurable for mundane reasons, but, cosmically, as cyclical, unquantifiable, and not tied to space at all. Ancient Greek philosophers had varying views on time: Antiphon the Sophist wrote, in the fifth century BCE: "Time is not a reality (hypostasis), but a concept (noêma) or a measure (metron)." Parmenides of Elea, who lived around the same time, considered existence as timeless; motion and change were illusions—what our senses told us were false.

    The Buddha (c. 563 BCE or c. 480 BCE–c. 483 BCE or c. 400 BCE) said, Life is ever changing, moment to moment. The only constant is change. Thus, since reality is fluid, possibility is unpredictable, and the past nonexistent—now is all there is.

    Even in historical Western science and philosophy there are different points of view—the realist perspective or Newtonian time, and the relational theory to which Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) adhered:

    [Sir Isaac] Newton . . . did not regard space and time as genuine substances . . . but rather as real entities with their own manner of existence . . . To paraphrase: Absolute, true, and mathematical time, from its own nature, passes equably without relation to anything external, and thus without reference to any change or way of measuring of time (e.g., the hour, day, month, or year). [Rynasiewicz, Robert: Johns Hopkins University (12 August 2004). Newton’s Views on Space, Time, and Motion, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University.]

    Leibniz postulated:  . . . space and time are internal or intrinsic features of the complete concepts of things, not extrinsic . . . Leibniz’s view has two major implications. First, there is no absolute location in either space or time; location is always the situation of an object or event relative to other objects and events. Second, space and time are not in themselves real (that is, not substances). Space and time are, rather, ideal. Space and time are just metaphysically illegitimate ways of perceiving certain virtual relations between substances. They are phenomena or, strictly speaking, illusions (although they are illusions that are well-founded upon the internal properties of substances) . . . [Burnham, Douglas: Staffordshire University (2006). Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) Metaphysics–7. Space, Time, and Indiscernibles." The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.]

    Still—I suspect individual human imaginations have always considered going back to the past for one reason or another and yearned to take a peek at what the future holds.

    [Editorial Note: All dates from this point on stated as CE.]

    As a fictional theme, time travel is a concept that has existed in English-language literature at least since 1843 when Charles Dickens’s character, Scrooge, traveled back and forth in time (was it all a dream?) in A Christmas Carol. In one of Edgar Allan Poe’s early (and lesser) works of short fiction, A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (1844), a character named Bedloe can inexplicably recount being at a battle in India in 1780. Although not a dream, the time travel is ambiguously explained: perhaps galvanic shock or mesmerism or even reincarnation is the answer.

    Edward Page Mitchell’s story, The Clock That Went Backward—more easily defined as a true time-travel tale—was published in 1881. But the concept gained a firm grip on popular imagination with H. G. Wells’s novella The Time Machine in 1895. (It was inspired by his earlier—1888—short story, The Chronic Argonauts.)

    Just a decade later, in 1905, Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity . . . and time travel (of a sort) suddenly seemed, if not probable, at least possible. The time-dilation effect of special relativity (now proven) is most easily and commonly explained with a tiny fiction: There is a pair of twins. One stays on Earth, the other—traveling at close to the speed of light—takes a trip into outer space and back that lasts ten years as far as the Earth-bound twin is concerned. But for the space-voyaging twin, very little time has passed at all. The stay-at-home twin has aged a decade while the traveler leaped ten years into the future and does not age.

    And, as we now know but don’t really notice, we are all traveling into the future at different infinitesimally small (but real) rates. The universe is structured so that we have to be traveling into the future all the time.

    Visiting the past, or coming back from the future—well, that’s a different matter. But now, we can now at least consider the possibility, thanks to scientists who—starting in the mid 1980s—have theorized the possibility of traversable wormholes in general relativity. Since then, many highly theoretical ways to warp space and time have been proposed . . . and challenged . . . paradoxes noted . . . and countered.

    Meanwhile, science has both inspired and been ignored by fiction writers and filmmakers who have never stopped imagining time travel. Nor, evidently, has it lost its allure for the public.

    Long a plot point for myriad television episodes and a few series over the years, the concept of time travel was integral to the recent series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008–2009) and The Fringe (2008–2013). Doctor Who’s time- and space-traveling Time Lord and his vehicle, the Tardis (1963–current), are cultural icons.

    Time travel has also remained an entertaining, if not always in-depth, consideration in films. Among the recent: The Butterfly Effect (2004), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Meet the Robinsons (animated, 2007), The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009), Star Trek (2009), Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (2009, UK-only), Looper (2012), About Time (2013), Time Travel Lover (short, 2014) and X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014).

    Nor has the (probably) most popular (and possibly the best) time-travel movie been forgotten. The now-venerable film Back to the Future, released in 1985, will debut as a stage musical in London’s West End in 2015, the thirtieth anniversary of the film’s release.

    Time travel has remained a theme, if not exactly a staple, of novels. Only two novels—Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (Scribner, 2011) and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (actually published in 2003, but the 2009 movie has kept it on bestseller lists)—have reached huge reading audiences.

    The outstanding Blackout and All Clear (one novel in two volumes; Spectra, 2010) by Connie Willis won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards. The duology—part of Willis’s fiction involving a mid-twenty-first century time traveler from Oxford, England—has reached a more than respectable readership, but not sold the hundreds of thousand copies King and Niffenegger have.

    The same can be said for Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe (Pantheon, 2010).

    The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Umuzi, South Africa; HarperCollins, United Kingdom; Mulholland Books, US; 2013)—which received both high praise and some mixed reviews—has gained considerable readership, but has not yet made a major impact.

    The late Kage Baker’s historical time-travel science fiction stories and novels of The Company (first novel: In the Garden of Iden, Harcourt, 1997) have continued into this decade, most notably with the novel The Empress of Mars (Tor, 2009), collections Gods and Pawns (Tor 2007), The Best of Kage Baker (Subterranean, 2012), and—with the assistance of her Baker’s sister, Kathleen Bartholomew—In the Company of Thieves (Tachyon, 2013). Novella The Women of Nell Gwynne’s (Subterranean, 2009) won the Nebula and Locus Awards, and was nominated for Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. Baker’s work has, so-far, achieved at least a cult-level popularity.

    Other notable time-travel novels of the period include: The Plot to Save Socrates (Tor, 2007) and its sequel, Unburning Alexandria (JoSara MeDia, 2013), by Paul Levinson; Man in the Empty Suit by Sean Ferrell (Soho Press, 2013); The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill (Ace, 2013) and Child of a Hidden Sea by A. M. Dellamonica (Tor, 2014).

    Time travel is also a popular theme in the romance genre, but the chronological is considerably outweighed by the carnal (or merely starry-eyed) in these plots, so I shan’t delve into them here.

    Plotwise, the same is often true with recent young adult titles, but some emphasize adventure and/or intrigue more than romance. A few bestselling titles from the last few years in this latter category include Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly (Random House Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2010), The Here and Now by Ann Brashares (Delacorte, 2014), The Glass Sentence by S.E. Grove (Viking Juvenile, 2014), and—for even younger readers (8-12 years)—the Newbery Award-winning When you Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (Yearling, 2009).

    As for the short form—time travel fiction in the current era offers vast variety and a wealth of choices, as I hope this volume helps substantiate. Solid theoretical physics underlies some stories, others eschew the scientific for either the fantastic or the ambiguous-or-only assumed science. Nor is the theme always taken completely seriously. Motivation for chronological wanderings or observations are just as diverse. Thus, in these eighteen stories, you will find the need to acknowledge history combining with political complexity and mixing with theoretical physics . . . an ancestor’s heroics inspiring one chrononaut while recording history itself fascinating another . . . only the details of properly dressing time travelers is considered in one story . . . vacations are taken to observe dinosaurs and repair relationships . . . experimental trips taken . . . viewing the past is a struggle to save the world . . . time travel is controlled by bureaucracy . . . love makes a man go back and try to alter the history . . . history is merely recorded . . . a scientific breakthrough is used to learn of a personal past and glimpse one’s own future . . . art is saved from destruction . . . the past is sometimes changed and the future altered, or not . . . time travel is one of the many layers of rip-snorting, action-packed, retro-Mars adventure . . . and much, much more.

    So enjoy your many journeys, but don’t lose track of when you are.

    Paula Guran

    Bastille Day 2014

    WITH FATE CONSPIRE

    Vandana Singh

    I saw him in a dream, the dead man. He was dreaming too, and I couldn’t tell if I was in his dream or he in mine. He was floating over a delta, watching a web of rivulets running this way and that, the whole stream rushing to a destination I couldn’t see.

    I woke up with the haunted feeling that I had been used to in my youth. I haven’t felt like that in a long time. The feeling of being possessed, inhabited, although lightly, as though a homeless person was sleeping in the courtyard of my consciousness. The dead man wasn’t any trouble; he was just sharing the space in my mind, not really caring who I was. But this returning of my old ability, as unexpected as it was, startled me out of the apathy in which I had been living my life. I wanted to find him, this dead man.

    I think it is because of the Machine that these old feelings are being resurrected. It takes up an entire room, although the only part of it I see is the thing that looks like a durbeen, a telescope. The Machine looks into the past, which is why I’ve been thinking about my own girlhood. If I could spy on myself as I ran up and down the crowded streets and alleys of Park Circus! But the scientists who work the Machine tell me that the scope can’t look into the recent past. They never tell me the why of anything, even when I ask—they smile and say, Don’t bother about things like that, Gargi-di! What you are doing is great, a great contribution. To my captors—they think they are my benefactors but truly, they are my captors—to them, I am something very special, because of my ability with the scope; but because I am not like them, they don’t really see me as I am.

    An illiterate woman, bred in the back streets and alleyways of Old Kolkata, of no more importance than a cockroach—what saved me from being stamped out by the great, indifferent foot of the mighty is this . . . ability. The Machine gives sight to a select few, and it doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, man or woman.

    I wonder if they guess I’m lying to them?

    They’ve set the scope at a particular moment of history: the spring of 1856, and a particular place: Metiabruz in Kolkata. I am supposed to spy on an exiled ruler of that time, to see what he does every morning, out on the terrace, and to record what he says. He is a large, sad, weepy man. He is the Nawab of Awadh, ousted from his beloved home by the conquering British. He is a poet.

    They tell me he wrote the song Babul Mora, which to me is the most interesting and important thing about him, because I learned that song as a girl. The song is about a woman leaving, looking back at her childhood home, and it makes me cry sometimes even though my childhood wasn’t idyllic. And yet there are things I remember, incongruous things like a great field of rice and water gleaming between the new shoots, and a bagula, hunched and dignified like an old priest, standing knee deep in water, waiting for fish. I remember the smell of the sea, many miles away, borne on the wind. My mother’s village, Siridanga.

    How I began to lie to my captors was sheer chance. There was something wrong with the Machine. I don’t understand how it works, of course, but the scientists were having trouble setting the date. The girl called Nondini kept cursing and muttering about spacetime fuzziness. The fact that they could not look through the scope to verify what they were doing, not having the kind of brain suitable for it, meant that I had to keep looking to check whether they had got back to Wajid Ali Shah in the Kolkata of 1856.

    I’ll never forget when I first saw the woman. I knew it was the wrong place and time, but, instead of telling my captors, I kept quiet. She was looking up toward me (my viewpoint must have been near the ceiling). She was not young, but she was respectable, you could see that. A housewife squatting on her haunches in a big, old-fashioned kitchen, stacking dirty dishes. I don’t know why she looked up for that moment but it struck me at once: the furtive expression on her face. A sensitive face, with beautiful eyes, a woman who, I could tell, was a warm-hearted motherly type—so why did she look like that, as though she had a dirty secret? The scope doesn’t stay connected to the past for more than a few blinks of the eye, so that was all I had: a glimpse.

    Nondini nudged me, asking Gargi-di, is that the right place and time? Without thinking, I said yes.

    That is how it begins: the story of my deception. That simple yes began the unraveling of everything.

    The institute is a great glass monstrosity that towers above the ground somewhere in New Parktown, which I am told is many miles south of Kolkata. Only the part we’re on is not flooded. All around my building are other such buildings, so that when I look out of the window I see only reflections—of my building and the others and my own face, a small, dark oval. At first it drove me crazy, being trapped not only by the building but also by these tricks of light.

    And my captors were trapped too, but they seemed unmindful of the fact. They had grown accustomed. I resolved in my first week that I would not become accustomed. No, I didn’t regret leaving behind my mean little life, with all its difficulties and constraints, but I was under no illusions. I had exchanged one prison for another.

    In any life, I think, there are apparently unimportant moments that turn out to matter the most. For me as a girl it was those glimpses of my mother’s village, poor as it was. I don’t remember the bad things. I remember the sky, the view of paddy fields from my grandfather’s hut on a hillock, and the tame pigeon who cooed and postured on a wooden post in the muddy little courtyard. I think it was here I must have drawn my first real breath. There was an older cousin I don’t recall very well, except as a voice, a guide through this exhilarating new world, where I realized that food grew on trees, that birds and animals had their own tongues, their languages, their stories. The world exploded into wonders during those brief visits. But always they were just small breaks in my life as one more poor child in the great city. Or so I thought. What I now think is that those moments gave me a taste for something I’ve never had—a kind of freedom, a soaring.

    I want to be able to share this with the dead man who haunts my dreams. I want him, whoever he is, wherever he is, to have what I had so briefly. The great open spaces, the chance to run through the fields and listen to the birds tell their stories. He might wake up from being dead then, might think of other things besides deltas.

    He sits in my consciousness so lightly, I wonder if he even exists, whether he is an imagining rather than a haunting. But I recognize the feeling of a haunting like that, even though it has been years since I experienced the last one.

    The most important haunting of my life was when I was, maybe, fourteen. We didn’t know our birthdays, so I can’t be sure. But I remember that an old man crept into my mind, a tired old man. Like Wajid Ali Shah more than a hundred years ago, this man was a poet. But there the similarity ended because he had been ground down by poverty; his respectability was all he had left. When I saw him in my mind he was sitting under an awning. There was a lot of noise nearby, the kind of hullabaloo that a vegetable market generates. I sensed immediately that he was miserable, and this was confirmed later when I met him. All my hauntings have been of people who are hurt, or grieving, or otherwise in distress.

    He wasn’t a mullah, Rahman Khan, but the street kids all called him Maula, so I did too. I think he accepted it with deprecation. He was a kind man. He would sit under a tree at the edge of the road with an old typewriter, waiting for people to come to him for typing letters and important documents and so on. He only had a few customers. Most of the time he would stare into the distance with rheumy eyes, seeing not the noisy market but some other vista, and he would recite poetry. I found time from my little jobs in the fruit market to sit by him and sometimes I would bring him a stolen pear or mango. He was the one who taught me to appreciate language, the meanings of words. He told me about poets he loved, Wajid Ali Shah and Khayyam and Rumi, and our own Rabindranath and Nazrul, and the poets of the humbler folk, the baul and the maajhis. Once I asked him to teach me how to read and write. He had me practice letters in Hindi and Bengali on discarded sheets of typing paper, but the need to fill our stomachs prevented me from giving time to the task, and I soon forgot what I’d learned. In any case at that age I didn’t realize its importance—it was no more than a passing fancy. But he did improve my Hindi, which I had picked up from my father, and taught me some Urdu, and a handful of songs, including Babul Mora.

    Babul Mora, he would sing in his thin, cracked voice. Naihar chuuto hi jaaye.

    It is a woman’s song, a woman leaving her childhood home with her newlywed husband, looking back from the cart for the last time. Father mine, my home slips away from me. Although my father died before I was grown, the song still brings tears to my eyes.

    The old man gave me my fancy way of speaking. People laugh at me sometimes when I use nice words, nicely, when a few plain ones would do. What good is fancy speech to a woman who grew up poor and illiterate? But I don’t care. When I talk in that way I feel as though I am touching the essence of the world. I got that from Maula. All my life I have tried to give away what I received but my one child died soon after birth and nobody else wanted what I had. Poetry. A vision of freedom. Rice fields, birds, the distant blue line of the sea. Siridanga.

    Later, after my father died, I started to work in people’s houses with my mother. Clean and cook, and go to another house, clean and cook. Some of the people were nice but others yelled at us and were suspicious of us. I remember one fat lady who smelled strongly of flowers and sweat, who got angry because I touched the curtains.

    The curtains were blue and white and had lace on them, and I had never seen anything as delicate and beautiful. I reached my hand out and touched them and she yelled at me. I was just a child, and whatever she said, my hands weren’t dirty. I tried to defend myself but my mother herself shut me up. She didn’t want to lose her job. I remember being so angry I thought I would catch fire from inside. I think all those houses must be under water now. There will be fish nibbling at the fine lace drawing room curtains. Slime on the walls, the carpets rotted. All our cleaning for nothing!

    I have to find the dead man. I have to get out of here somehow.

    The scientist called Nondini sees me as a real person, I think, not just as someone with a special ability who is otherwise nothing special. She has sympathy for me partly because there is a relative of hers who might still be in a refugee camp, and she has been going from one to the other to try to find her. The camps are mostly full of slum-dwellers because when the river overflowed and the sea came over the land, it drowned everything except for the skyscrapers. All the people who lived in slums or low buildings, who didn’t have relatives with intact homes, had to go to the camps. I was in the big one, Sahapur, where they actually tried to help people find jobs, and tested them for all kinds of practical skills, because we were—most of us—laborers, domestic help, that sort of thing. And they gave us medical tests also. That’s how I got my job, my large clean room with a big-screen TV, and all the food I want—after they found out I had the kind of brain the Machine can use.

    But I can’t go back to the camp to see my friends. Many of them had left before me anyway, farmed out to corporations where they could be useful with medical tests and get free medicines also. Ashima had cancer and she got to go to one of those places, but there is no way I can find out what happened to her. I imagine her somewhere like this place, with everything free and all the mishti-doi she can eat. I hope she’s all right. Kabir had a limp from birth but he’s only eighteen, so maybe they can fix it. When she has time, Nondini lets me talk about them. Otherwise I feel as though nothing from that time was real, that I never had a mother and father, or a husband who left me after our son died. As if my friends never existed. It drives me crazy sometimes to return to my room after working in the same building, and to find nothing but the same programs on the TV. At first I was so excited about all the luxury but now I get bored and fretful to the point where I am scared of my impulses. Especially when the night market comes and sets up on the streets below, every week. I can’t see the market from my high window, but I can see the lights dancing on the windows of the building on the other side of the square. I can smell fish frying and hear people talking, yelling out prices, and I hear singing. It is the singing that makes my blood wild. The first time they had a group of maajhis come, I nearly broke the window glass, I so wanted to jump out. They know how to sing to the soul.

    Maajhi, O Maajhi

    My beloved waits

    On the other shore . . .

    I think the scientists are out at the market all night, because when they come in the next day, on Monday, their eyes are red, and they are bad-tempered, and there is something far away about them, as though they’ve been in another world. It could just be the rice beer, of course.

    My captors won’t let me out for some months, until they are sure I’ve settled down. I can’t even go to another floor of this building.

    There have been cases of people from the refugee camps escaping from their jobs, trying to go back to their old lives, their old friends, as though those things existed any more. So there are rules that you have to be on probation before you are granted citizenship of the city, which then allows you to go freely everywhere. Of course everywhere is mostly under water, for what it’s worth. Meanwhile Nondini lets me have this recorder that I’m speaking into, so I won’t get too lonely. So I can hear my own voice played back. What a strange one she is!

    Nondini is small and slight, with eyes that slant up just a little at the corners. She has worked hard all her life to study history. I never knew there was so much history in the world until my job began! She keeps giving me videos about the past—not just Wajid Ali Shah but also further back, to the time when the British were here, and before that when Kolkata was just a little village on the Hugli river. It is nearly impossible to believe that there was a time when the alleyways and marketplaces and shantytowns and skyscrapers didn’t exist—there were forests and fields, and the slow windings of the river, and wild animals. I wish I could see that. But they—the scientists—aren’t interested in that period.

    What they do want to know is whether there were poems or songs of Wajid Ali Shah that were unrecorded. They want me to catch him at a moment when he would recite something new that had been forgotten over the centuries. What I don’t understand is, Why all this fuss about old poetry? I like poetry more than most people, but it isn’t what you’d do in the middle of a great flood. When I challenge the scientists some of them look embarrassed, like Brijesh; and Unnikrishnan shakes his head. Their leader, Dr. Mitra, she just looks impatient, and Nondini says poetry can save the world. I may be uneducated but I am not stupid. They’re hiding something from me.

    The housewife—the woman for whom I have abandoned Wajid Ali Shah—interests me. Her name is Rassundari—I know, because someone in her household called her name. Most of the time they call her Rasu or Sundari, or daughter-in-law, or sister-in-law, etcetera, but this time some visitor called out her full name, carefully and formally. I wish I could talk to her. It would be nice to talk to someone who is like me. How stupid that sounds! This woman clearly comes from a rich rural family—a big joint family it is, all under the same roof. She is nothing like me. But I feel she could talk to me as an ordinary woman, which is what I am.

    I wish I could see the outside of her house. They are rich landowners, so it must be beautiful outside. I wonder if it is like my mother’s village. Odd that although I have hardly spent any time in Siridanga, I long for it now as though I had been born there.

    The first time after I found Rassundari, Nondini asked me if I’d discovered anything new about Wajid Ali Shah. I felt a bit sorry for her because I was deceiving her, so I said, out of my head, without thinking:

    I think he’s writing a new song.

    The scope doesn’t give you a clear enough view to read writing in a book, even if I could read. But Wajid Ali Shah loves gatherings of poets and musicians, where he sings or recites his own works. So Nondini asked me:

    Did he say anything out loud?

    Again without thinking I said, maybe because I was tired, and lonely, and missing my friends:

    "Yes, but only one line: ‘If there was someone for such as me . . . ’ " I had spoken out of the isolation I had been feeling, and out of irritation, because I wanted to get back to my housewife. I would have taken my lie back at once if I could. Nondini’s eyes lit up.

    That is new! I must record that! And in the next room there was a flurry of activity.

    So began my secret career as a poet.

    Rassundari works really hard. One day I watched her nearly all day, and she was in the kitchen almost the whole time. Cooking, cleaning, supervising a boy who comes to clean the dishes. The people of the house seem to eat all the time. She always waits for them to finish before she eats, but that day she didn’t get a chance at all. A guest came at the last minute after everyone had eaten lunch, so she cooked for him, and after that one of the small children was fussing so she took him on her lap and tried to eat her rice, which was on a plate on the floor in front of her, but she had taken just one mouthful when he urinated all over her and her food. The look on her face! There was such anguish, but after a moment she began to laugh. She comforted the child and took him away to clean up, and came back and cleaned the kitchen, and by that time it was evening and time to cook the evening meal. I felt so bad for her! I have known hunger sometimes as a girl, and I could not have imagined that a person who was the daughter-in-law of such a big house could go hungry too. She never seems to get angry about it—I don’t understand that, because I can be quick to anger myself. But maybe it is because everyone in the house is nice to her. I can only see the kitchen of course, but whenever people come in to eat or just to talk with her, they treat her well—even her mother-in-law speaks kindly to her.

    Her older son is a charming little boy, who comes and sits near her when he is practicing his lessons. He is learning the alphabet.

    She makes him repeat everything to her several times. Seeing him revives the dull pain in my heart that never goes away. I wonder what my child would have looked like, had he survived. He only lived two days. But those are old sorrows.

    I want to know why Rassundari looks, sometimes, like she has a guilty secret.

    The dead man has started talking to me in my dreams. He thinks I am someone called Kajori, who must have been a lover. He cries for me, thinking I’m her. He weeps with agony, calls to me to come to his arms, sleep in his bed. I have to say that while I am not the kind of woman who would jump into the arms of just any man, let alone one who is dead, his longing awakes the loneliness in me. I remember what it was like to love a man, even though my husband turned out to be a cowardly bastard. In between his sobs the dead man mutters things that perhaps only this Kajori understands.

    Floating over the silver webbing of the delta, he babbles about space and time.

    Time! he tells me. Look, look at that rivulet. Look at this one.

    It seems to me that he thinks the delta is made by a river of time, not water. He says time has thickness—and it doesn’t flow in one straight line—it meanders. It splits up into little branches, some of which join up again. He calls this fine structure. I have never thought about this before, but the idea makes sense. The dead man shows me history, the sweep of it, the rise and fall of kings and dynasties, how the branches intersect and move on, and how some of the rivulets dry up and die. He tells me how the weight of events and possibilities determines how the rivulets of time flow.

    I must save the world, he says at the end, just before he starts to cry.

    I know Rassundari’s secret now.

    She was sitting in the kitchen alone, after everyone had eaten. She squatted among the pots and pans, scouring them, looking around her warily like a thief in her own house. She dipped a wet finger into the ash pile and wrote on the thali the letter her son had been practicing in the afternoon, kah. She wrote it big, which is how I could see it. She said it aloud, that’s how I know what letter it was.

    She erased it, wrote it again. The triangular shape of the first loop, the down-curve of the next stroke, like a bird bending to drink. Yes, and the line of the roof from which the character was suspended, like wet socks on a clothesline. She shivered with pleasure. Then someone called her name, and she hastily scrubbed the letter away.

    How strange this is! There she is, in an age when a woman, a respectable upper-caste woman, isn’t supposed to be able to read, so she has to learn on the sly, like a criminal. Here I am, in an age when women can be scientists like Nondini, yet I can’t read. What I learned from the Maula, I forgot. I can recognize familiar shop signs and so on from their shapes, not the sounds the shapes are supposed to represent, and anyway machines tell you everything. Nondini tells me that now very few people need to read because of mobiles, and because information can be shown and spoken by machines.

    After watching Rassundari write for the first time, that desire woke in me, to learn how to read. My captors would not have denied me materials if I’d asked them, but I thought it would be much more interesting to learn from a woman dead for maybe hundreds of years. This is possible because the Machine now stays stuck in the set time and place for hours instead of minutes. Earlier it would keep disconnecting after five or ten minutes and you would have to wait until it came back. Its new steadiness makes the scientists very happy.

    So now when I am at the scope, my captors leave me to myself. As Rassundari writes, I copy the letters on a sheet of paper and whisper the sounds under my breath.

    The scientists annoy me after each session with their questions, and sometimes when I feel wicked I tell them that Wajid Ali Shah is going through a dry spell. Other times I make up lines that he supposedly spoke to his gathering of fellow poets. I tell them these are bits and fragments and pieces of longer works.

    If there was someone for such as me

    Would that cause great inconvenience for you, O universe?

    Would the stars go out and fall from the sky?

    I am enjoying this, even though my poetry is that of a beginner, crude, and direct. Wajid Ali Shah also wrote in the commoner’s tongue, which makes my deception possible. I also suspect that these scientists don’t know enough about poetry to tell the difference.

    My dear teacher, the Maula, would talk for hours about rhyme and lilt, and the difference between a ghazal and a rubayi. I didn’t understand half of what he said but I learned enough to know that there is a way of talking about poetry if you are learned in the subject. And the scientists don’t seem to react like that. They just exclaim and repeat my lines, and wonder whether this is a fragment, or a complete poem.

    One day I want to write my poetry in my own hand.

    Imagine me, Gargi, doing all this! A person of no importance and look where life has got me!

    I now know who Kajori is.

    I didn’t know that was her first name. Even the older scientists call her Dr. Mitra. She’s a tall, thin woman, the boss of the others, and she always looks busy and harassed. Sometimes she smiles, and her smile is twisted. I took a dislike to her at first because she always looked through me, as though I wasn’t there. Now I still dislike her but I’m sorry for her. And angry with her. The dead man, her lover, she must have sent him away, trapped him in that place where he floats above the delta of the river of time. It’s my dreams he comes into, not hers. I can hardly bear his agony, his weeping, the way he calls out for her. I wonder why she has abandoned him.

    I think he’s in this building. The first time this thought occurred to me I couldn’t stop shaking. It made sense. All my hauntings have been people physically close to me.

    They won’t let me leave this floor. I can leave my room now, but the doors to the stairs are locked, and the lifts don’t work after everyone leaves. But I will find a way. I’m tired of being confined like this.

    I realize now that although I was raised poor and illiterate, I was then at least free to move about, to breathe the air, to dream of my mother’s home. Siridanga! I want to go back there and see it before I die. I know that the sea has entered the cities and drowned the land, but Siridanga was on a rise overlooking the paddy fields.

    My grandparents’ hut was on the hillock. Could it still be there? The night market makes me feel restless. The reflections of the lights dance on the windowpanes of the opposite building, as though they are writing something. All this learning to read is making me crazy, because I see letters where they don’t exist. In the reflections. In people’s hand gestures. And even more strangely, I see some kind of writing in the flow of time, in the dreams the dead man brings me. Those are written in a script I cannot read.

    I discovered a whole verse of Wajid Ali Shah’s poem today, after hours at the scope. There was so much excitement in the analysis room that the scientists let me go to my quarters early. I pleaded a headache but they hardly noticed. So I slipped out, into the elevator, and went up, and down, and got off on floors and walked around. I felt like a mad person, a thief, a free bird. It was ridiculous what an effect this small freedom had!

    But after a while I began to get frightened. There was nobody else on the other floors as far as I could tell. The rooms were silent, dark behind doors with glass slits. I know that the scientists live somewhere here, maybe in the other buildings. Nondini tells me we are in a cluster of buildings near the sea that were built to withstand the flood. From her hints and from the TV I know that the world is ending. It’s not just here. Everywhere cities are flooded or consumed by fire. Everything is dying. I have never been able to quite believe this before, perhaps because of my peculiar situation, which prevents me from seeing things for myself. But ultimately the silence and darkness of the rest of the building brought it home to me, and I felt as if I were drowning in sadness.

    Then I sensed a pull, a current—a shout in my mind. It was him, the dead man. Kajori! he called again and again, and I found myself climbing to the floor above, to a closed door in the dark corridor.

    I tried the handle, felt the smooth, paneled wood, but of course it was locked. With my ear against the door I could feel the hum of machinery, and there was a soft flow of air from beneath the door.

    I called back to him in my mind.

    I can’t get in, I said. Talk to me!

    His voice in my mind was full of static, so I couldn’t understand everything. Even when I heard the words, they didn’t make sense. I think he was muttering to himself, or to Kajori.

     . . . rivulets of time . . . two time-streams come together . . . ah . . . in a loop . . . if only . . . shift the flow, shift the flow . . . another future . . . must lock to past coordinate, establish resonance . . . new tomorrow . . . 

    The chowkidar who is supposed to guard the elevator caught me on my way downstairs. He is a lazy, sullen fellow who never misses an opportunity to throw his weight around. I am more than a match for him though. He reported me, of course, to Nondini and Unnikrishnan, but I argued my case well. I simply said I was restless and wanted to see if there was a nice view from the other floors.

    What could they say to that?

    I tried to make sense of the dead man’s gibberish all day. At night he came into my dreams as usual. I let him talk, prompting him with questions when something didn’t make sense. I had to be clever to conceal my ignorance, since he thought I was Kajori, but the poor fellow is so emotionally overwrought that he is unlikely to be suspicious. But when he started weeping in his loneliness, I couldn’t bear it. I thought: I will distract him with poetry.

    I told him about the poem I am writing. It turns out he likes poetry. The poem he and Kajori love the best is an English translation of something by Omar Khayyam.

    Remember it, Kajori? he said to me. He recited it in English, which I don’t understand, and then in Bangla—Oh love, if you and I could, with fate conspire, he said, taking me with a jolt back to my girlhood: me sitting by the Maula in the mad confusion of the market, the two of us seeing nothing but poetry, mango juice running down our chins. Oh yes, I remember, I said to my dead man. Then it was my turn. I told him about what I was writing and he got really interested. Suggested words, gave me ideas. So two lines of Wajid Ali Shah’s poem came to me.

    Clouds are borne on the wind

    The river winds toward home

    It was only the next day that I started to connect things in my mind. I think I know what the project is really about.

    These people are not scientists, they are jadugars. Or maybe that’s

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