“Isn’t that the same bio?” Ephrem reached for her device, read for a moment, then handed it back with a sigh. “If you hadn’t changed the time line,” he said to Gaspery, “he still would’ve died of the flu, just forty-eight hours later and in an insane asylum. You see how pointless that was?”
“You’re missing the point,” Gaspery said.
“That’s very possible.” Were there tears in Ephrem’s eyes? He looked tired and strained. A man who’d preferred being an arborist; a man in a difficult position, doing a difficult job. “Is there anything you’d like to say?”
“Are we at last words already, Ephrem?”
“Well, last words in this century,” Ephrem said. “Last words on the moon. I’m afraid you’ll be traveling some distance and not returning.”
“Can you take care of my cat?” Gaspery asked.
Ephrem blinked.
“Yes, Gaspery, I’ll take care of your cat.”
“Thank you.”
“Is there anything else?”
“I’d do it again,” Gaspery said. “I wouldn’t even hesitate.”
Ephrem sighed. “Good to know.” He’d been holding a glass bottle behind his back. He raised it now, and misted something in Gaspery’s face. There was a sweet scent, a dimming of the lights, then Gaspery’s legs were giving way—
3
—as he faded out, he had an impression that Ephrem had stepped into the machine behind him—
4
—Two gunshots, in quick succession—
Footsteps, a man running away—
Gaspery was in a tunnel. Light at either end, not just light but snow—
No, not a tunnel, an overpass. He could smell the exhaust of twentieth-century cars. He was very sleepy, from whatever he’d just been misted with. His back was to the embankment.
Ephrem was there too, calm and efficient in his dark suit. “I’m sorry, Gaspery,” he said softly, his breath warm in Gaspery’s ear. “I really am.” He plucked Gaspery’s device from his hand and replaced it with something hard and cold and much heavier—
A gun. Gaspery looked at it, curious, and the running man—the shooter, he realized dimly—disappeared, scrambling away and out of sight. Ephrem was gone too, a passing ghost. The air was cold.
He heard a soft groan near his feet. It was difficult for Gaspery to stay awake. His eyes kept closing. But he saw two men lying nearby, two men whose blood was seeping across the concrete, and one of them was staring directly at him. There was clear confusion in the man’s stare—Who are you? Where did you come from?—but he’d passed beyond speaking, and as Gaspery watched, the light left his eyes. Gaspery was alone under an expressway with two dead men. He nodded off, just for a moment. When he opened his eyes, he was staring at the gun in his hand, and the pieces of the puzzle were drifting together. It’s possible to get lost in time, Zoey had said, in a different century. Why go to the bother of incarcerating a man for life on the moon, when that man can be sent elsewhere, framed, and imprisoned at someone else’s expense?
He sensed movement to his left. He turned his head, very slowly, and saw the children. Two girls, aged perhaps nine and eleven, holding hands. They’d been walking under the overpass, but now they’d stopped some distance away, staring. He saw their backpacks, and realized they were on their way home from school.
Gaspery let the gun fall from his hand, and it clattered away like a harmless thing. There were lights washing over him now, red and blue. The girls were staring at the two dead men, then the younger girl looked at him, and he recognized her.
“Mirella,” he said.
5
No star burns forever. Gaspery scratched the words on a wall in prison some years later, so delicately that from any distance at all it looked like a flaw in the paint. You had to get close to see it, and you had to have lived in the twenty-second century or later to know what it meant. You had to have seen that twenty-second-century press conference, the president of China on a podium with a half-dozen of her favorite world leaders arrayed behind her, flags snapping against a brilliant blue sky.
There was time in prison, infinite time, so Gaspery spent a lot of it thinking about the past, no, the future, the point in time in which he’d walked into Zoey’s office on her birthday with cupcakes and flowers, and everything that had followed. What had happened now was terrible, he was in prison in the wrong century and he was going to die here, but as months slipped into years, he found his regrets were very few. Warning Olive Llewellyn of the approaching pandemic was not, no matter how he turned the moment over in his mind, the wrong thing to do. If someone’s about to drown, you have a duty to pull them from the water. His conscience was clear.