“What’s that you wrote there, Roberts?” Hazelton asked. Hazelton was his cellmate, a much younger man who paced and talked incessantly. Gaspery didn’t mind him.
“No star burns forever,” Gaspery said.
Hazelton nodded. “I like that,” he said. “Power of positive thinking, right? You’re in prison, but that’s not forever, because nothing is forever, right? Me, every time I start feeling a little down about my life, I—” He kept talking, but Gaspery stopped listening. He was calm these days, in a way he wouldn’t have expected. In the early evenings Gaspery liked to sit on the farthest possible edge of his bunk, almost falling off the end, because from that angle there was a sliver of sky visible through the window, and through it he could see the moon.
8
Anomaly
1
Is this the promised end?
A line from Olive Llewellyn’s novel Marienbad, but really a quote from Shakespeare. I found it in the prison library five or six years in, in a paperback with a missing cover.
2
No star burns forever.
3
Not long after my sixtieth birthday I developed some heart trouble, the kind of thing that could have been easily fixed in my own century but was dangerous in this time and place, and I was transferred to the prison hospital. I couldn’t see the moon from my bed, so there was nothing for it now but to close my eyes and play old movies:
walking to school in the Night City, past Olive Llewellyn’s childhood home
with its boarded-up front window and plaque;
standing in the church in Caiette in 1912 in my priest costume,
waiting for Edwin St. Andrew to stagger in;
chasing squirrels when I was five in the strip of wilderness
between the Night City dome and the Periphery Road;
drinking with Ephrem behind the school on an afternoon without sunlight when we were fifteen or so, one of those afternoons that felt a little dangerous,
even though all we were doing was getting slightly drunk and trading dumb jokes;
holding hands and laughing with my mother on a sunlit day in the Night City when I was six or seven, stopping to look down at the river from a
pedestrian bridge, the river dark and sparkling below—
“Gaspery.”
I felt a sharp pain in my arm. I gasped and almost cried out, but a hand was over my mouth.
“Shh,” Zoey whispered. She looked like she was in her early forties, she was wearing a nurse’s uniform, and she had just cut the tracker out of my arm. I stared at her, uncomprehending.
“I’m going to place this under your tongue,” she said. She held it up for me to see: a new tracker, to correspond with the new device that she was pressing into my hand. She had drawn the curtain around my bed. She held her device against mine for a second or two, until the devices flashed in a quick coordinated pattern. I stared at those lights—
4
—and we were in a different room, in a different place.
I was lying on my back on a wood floor, in a bedroom, in what seemed to me to be an old-fashioned kind of house. My arm was bleeding; I held it reflexively to my chest. Sunlight poured in through a window. I sat up. There was wallpaper with roses, wooden furniture, and through a doorway I saw a room with a shower and a toilet.
“What is this place?”
“This is a farm on the outskirts of Oklahoma City,” she said. “I’ve paid a great deal of money to the owners, and you can stay here indefinitely, as a boarder. The year is 2172.”
“2172,” I said. “So in twenty-three years, I’ll visit Oklahoma City to interview the violinist.”
“Yes.”
“How are you here? Surely the Time Institute didn’t approve this trip.”
“I was arrested that day,” she said. “The day you were sent to Ohio. I had tenure and an otherwise sterling record, so I wasn’t lost in time, but I spent a year in prison and then immigrated to the Far Colonies. The Time Institute thinks they have the only functional time machine in existence. They don’t.”
“There’s a time machine in the Far Colonies? And you just, what, get to use it?”
“I’m employed by…another organization there,” she said.
“Even with your record?”
“Gaspery,” she said, “no one’s better than me at what I do.” She spoke matter-of-factly; she wasn’t boasting.
“You know, I still don’t know what that is.”
She ignored this. “I made this mission a condition of my agreeing to take the job in the Far Colonies,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner. I mean to an earlier point in time.”