Time Travel: Recent Trips Read online

  TIME TRAVEL: RECENT TRIPS

  OTHER ANTHOLOGIES EDITED BY PAULA GURAN

  Embraces

  Best New Paranormal Romance

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  Zombies: The Recent Dead

  The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2010

  Vampires: The Recent Undead

  The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2011

  Halloween

  New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird

  Brave New Love

  Witches: Wicked, Wild & Wonderful

  Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire

  The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012

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  Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

  Rock On: The Greatest Hits of Science Fiction & Fantasy

  Season of Wonder

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  The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons

  The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2013

  Halloween: Magic, Mystery, & the Macabre

  Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales

  Magic City: Recent Spells

  The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2014

  Zombies: More Recent Dead

  TIME TRAVEL: RECENT TRIPS

  Edited by Paula Guran

  PRIME BOOKS

  TIME TRAVEL: RECENT TRIPS Copyright © 2014 by Paula Guran.

  Cover art by Julie Dillon. Cover design by Sherin Nicole.

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

  Prime Books

  Germantown, MD

  www.prime-books.com

  Publisher's Note: 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:

  [email protected]

  Print ISBN: 978-1-60701-434-8

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60701-439-3

  For Ann VanderMeer—

  with special thanks for

  pointing out a couple of these.

  Table of Contents

  Time Travel Orientation - Paula Guran

  With fate conspire - Vandana Singh

  Twember - Steve Rasnic Tem

  The Man Who Ended History:A Documentary - Ken Liu

  The Carpet Beds Of Sutro Park - Kage Baker

  Mating Habits Of The Late Rretaceous - Dale Bailey

  Blue Ink - Yoon Ha Lee

  Two Shot's from Fly's Photo Gallery - John Shirley

  The Mists of Time - Tom Purdom

  The King of Where-I-Go - Howard Waldrop

  Bespoke - Genevieve Valentine

  First Flight - Mary Robinette Kowal

  The Time Travel Club - Charlie Jane Anders

  The Ghosts of Christmas - Paul Cornell

  The Ile of Dogges - Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette

  September at Wall and Broad - Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Thought Experiment - Eileen Gunn

  Number 73 Glad Avenue - Suzanne J. Willis

  The Lost Canal - Michael Moorcock

  About the Authors

  Acknowledgements

  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 Englishlanguage 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 ScienceFictional 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 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 starryeyed) 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.