“No, it isn’t.”
“Literally all I know that isn’t classified,” Ephrem said.
“How do you get lost in time?”
“Suppose you were to intentionally fuck with the time line. The Time Institute might decide not to bring you back to the present.”
“Why would anyone intentionally fuck with the time line?”
“Exactly,” Ephrem said. “Don’t do that, and you’ll be fine.” He leaned over to touch a console on the wall, and a time line with photographs of people was suspended in the air between us. “I’ve been working on an investigation plan for you,” he said. “We don’t want to place you in the center of the anomaly, because we don’t know what the anomaly is, or how dangerous it might be. We want you to interview people who we think have seen it.”
He enlarged a very old photograph, black-and-white, of a worried-looking young man in military uniform. “This is Edwin St. Andrew, who experienced something in the forest at Caiette. You’ll visit him, and see if he’ll talk about it.”
“I didn’t know he was a soldier.”
“He won’t be when you speak with him. You’ll talk to him in 1912, and then later he’ll go on to have a very bad time on the Western Front. More tea?”
“Thank you.” I had no idea what the Western Front was and hoped it would be covered in my training.
He swiped the time line to the side, and I was looking at the composer from the footage Zoey had shown me. “In January 2020,” Ephrem continued, “an artist named Paul James Smith gave a performance that involved a video, and it seems like that video maybe shows the anomaly that St. Andrew described a century earlier, but we don’t know where exactly that video was taken. We don’t have complete footage of his concert, just the clip Zoey showed you. You’ll speak to him and see what you can learn.”
Ephrem swiped again, and I saw another photograph, an old man playing a violin in an airship terminal, his eyes closed. “This is Alan Sami,” Ephrem said. “He played the violin for several years in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal, circa 2200, and we believe it’s his music that Olive Llewellyn references in Marienbad. You’ll interview him and find out more about the music. Really just find out anything you can.” He moved on through the time line, and there was Olive Llewellyn, my mother’s favorite author, long-ago resident of Talia Anderson’s childhood home. “And here’s Olive Llewellyn. I regret to report that absolutely no one keeps surveillance footage for two hundred years, so there’s no record of whatever Olive Llewellyn may or may not have experienced there prior to writing Marienbad. You’ll interview her on her last book tour.”
“When was her last book tour?” I asked.
“November 2203. Early days of the SARS Twelve pandemic. Don’t worry, you won’t get sick.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It was one of our childhood immunizations,” Ephrem said.
“Will there be other investigators assigned to the case?”
“Several. They’ll look at different angles, interview different people, or interview the same people in a different way. You may meet some of them, but if they’re good at their jobs, you’ll never know who they are. From your perspective, Gaspery, this is not a complicated assignment. You’ll conduct a few interviews, and then hand off your findings to a more senior investigator, who will take over and make the final determination, and if all goes well, there will be other investigations for you. You could have an interesting career here.” He was gazing at the time line. “Where I think you’ll start,” he said, “is by interviewing the violinist.”
“Okay,” I said. “When do I talk to him?”
“In about five years,” Ephrem said. “You have some training to do first.”
9
The training wasn’t like immersing myself in a different world. It was like immersing myself in successive different worlds, these moments that had arisen one after another after another, worlds fading out so gradually that their loss was apparent only in retrospect. Years of private instruction in small rooms in the Institute, years of passing by people who may or may not have been my fellow students in the halls—no one wore name tags here—and years of studying quietly in the Time Institute library, or in my apartment late at night with my cat asleep on my lap. Five years after I left the hotel, I reported for the first time to the travel chamber.