“Here’s what you have to understand,” she said. “You don’t have to be a terrible person to intentionally try to change the time line. You just have to have a moment of weakness. Really just a moment. When I say weakness, I might mean something more like humanity.”
“And if you intentionally change the time line…”
“It’s not difficult to deliberately lose someone in time. Frame them for a crime they didn’t commit, for example, or, in less serious cases, they can just be placed somewhere with no way home.”
“Wouldn’t framing a traveler for a crime have, well, some repercussions for the time line?”
“The Research department maintains a list of crimes,” Zoey said. “Carefully selected, carefully vetted to avoid any major repercussions.”
（“Bureaucracy exists to protect itself,” Talia said, gazing out over the river.） Zoey cleared her throat. “Big day tomorrow,” she said. “Remind me where you’re going first?”
“1912,” I said, “to talk to Edwin St. Andrew. I’m going to pretend to be a priest and see if he’ll talk to me in the church.”
“Right. And then?”
“Then I’m going to January 2020,” I said, “to talk to the video artist, Paul James Smith, see what we can learn about that weird footage.”
She nodded. “And you talk to Olive Llewellyn the next day?”
“Yeah.” By now I’d read all of her books. I hadn’t especially liked any of them, but it was hard to parse whether this was the fault of the books or the fault of the dread I felt when I thought of her, given the timing of the scheduled interview.
“You know you’re meeting her in the last week of her life,” Zoey said. “You’ll interview her in Philadelphia, and she’ll die three days later in a hotel room in New York.”
“I know.” I felt a little sick about it.
Zoey’s face softened. “Remember how Mom used to quote Marienbad at us when we were kids?”
I nodded, and for a moment I was transported back to the hospital, the last days of our mother, the week outside of time and space when we never left her side.
“But you’ll keep it together, right?” In the way my sister looked at me, I knew she saw a previous Gaspery, a shiftless version of myself who was prone to error, who lived aimlessly and hadn’t spent the past five years in training and study and research.
“Of course. I’m a professional.”
I knew the facts of the life, and of the death: Olive Llewellyn died in a pandemic that began during a book tour. She died in an Atlantic Republic hotel room. But of course the thought of breaking the protocol occurred to me, then and in the morning two days later when I reported to the travel chamber, when the coordinates were entered into my device, when I stepped into the machine to meet her.
5
Last Book Tour on Earth /
2203
“Listen,” the journalist said, “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable or put you on the spot. But I’m curious if you experienced something strange in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal.”
In the quiet, Olive could hear the soft hum of the building, the sounds of ventilation and plumbing. Perhaps she wouldn’t have admitted it if he hadn’t caught her toward the end of the tour, if she hadn’t been so tired. The journalist, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, was watching her closely. She felt he already knew what she was about to say.
“I don’t mind talking about this,” she said, “but I’m afraid I’ll seem too eccentric if it makes it into the final version of the interview. Could we go off the record for a moment?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I was in the terminal. I was walking toward my flight, and I remember I walked by a guy playing a violin. And then all of a sudden, everything went dark and I was in a forest. Just for a second. It was…”
“It was exactly like you described it in the book,” Gaspery said.
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me anything else?”
“There’s not much else. It was so fast. I had an impression… This is going to sound crazy, but I was in two places at once. When I say I was in a forest, I was also still in the terminal.”
“I knew it,” he said.
“I’m not sure…” Olive didn’t know how to ask the question. “Does it mean something?” she asked.
He looked at her, and seemed to grapple with what to say next. “This will sound silly,” he said, in tones of forced lightness, “but my editor over at Contingencies Magazine likes me to end interviews with a fun question.”