IGMS Issue 50 (18 page)

"I have failed," I tapped to Ryke. I could only move my mandibles. My legs were strapped tightly.

Ryke, dear Ryke, tapped back. "Perhaps the sun will transform us. Perhaps it will give us new mouths, and we shall eat the Emperor."

But it only made me think of the carvings that had been destroyed, the carvings that would never be brought back.

The night sky lightened towards dawn, and we both lay silently.

"Will you enter the world of thought to protect yourself from the pain?" Ryke asked finally.

"No," I said. "I shall await the sun."

"Then so too will I."

The sun came over the horizon slowly, and heat began to mount.

Had I done rightly? I did not know. The sun's blazing was becoming painful.

"Perhaps you did not fail," said Ryke, his taps shaky. "Look."

I flopped my head over to look at the overhang in which the dirigible had been built. Behind the overhang, the sun raged. It was hard to look in that direction.

I forced through the pain of the sun to see workers with drills making crude holes in the thick walls and ceiling of the overhang. The sun shone through the holes to form a rough shape: a pyramid. They had made a sun carving.

"Rebellion," tapped Ryke with a hopeful cadence.

"Perhaps," I said. It could also have been commissioned by the Emperor to forestall just that. "We will never know the legacy of my crime."

"Nobody ever knows," tapped Ryke.

We fell silent, and I watched the workers until my vision was seared from me.

"Die beautifully," tapped Ryke.

I wondered if he was also now blind, but I didn't ask. It didn't seem right.

"Die beautifully," I said back to him, and braced myself for what would come next, be it transformation or scorched white nothingness.

It didn't matter who'd left the safety-gate at the top of the stairs open. The result was the same, the tragedy still there in twisted limbs and broken bones. But wherever the fault lay, it had happened, and so she'd tried to fix the mistake and made an even bigger mistake. Guilt on top of guilt. Had she been the one or not? It was too late to ever know for sure, since Mark's memories of it were gone. How could he have a memory of something that would never happen?

The cup crashed to the floor, spraying over-sweet tea and sharp shards of fine china across the blue-flowered pattern of the linoleum. It had only been a momentary lack of concentration--but then that's what had caused all of the problems in the first place.

This time her gaze had been intent on the hummingbird whirring green and blue wings at the bright red plastic feeder she'd put out the day before. That long ago day before. She barely remembered that yesterday anymore, it had been so long since she'd lived it. But her thoughts had been scattered as she'd tried to gather herself for yet another go at getting it all right, and she hadn't paid attention to where the table was, and had placed her cup it half off the edge.

The hummingbird was right. She remembered that much. She wasn't sure if it mattered, but she knew by now it was vital to try and do everything exactly the way she had before and try and reduce random changes.

But breaking the cup hadn't been part of it. The ruins of the cup that had once been her grandmother's still quivered in the aftermath of the destruction, shards slowly spinning to a stop. She heard the water running in the bathroom. Mark would be finished with his shower soon, and he'd come into the kitchen. If he found her cleaning up a mess of broken porcelain, that would throw everything off.

Carol looked down at the Rorschach blot of brown tea on the pale blue flowers of the floor. She'd have to do it again. Just a small one though, not even a minute long. Just long enough to make sure she didn't break the cup. Better to do it now than wait and see if breaking the cup messed up all the rest. There were only so many times that she'd be able to go through this. Only so many times she could stand to go back and start over.

Soon it will work out though, she told herself. Soon I'll get it right. Soon I can end this.

Nothing ever happens the same way twice. You can't say you changed the future if the future only happened to you.

The hummingbird flitted around the feeder, and she lifted the intact cup to her lips. She took a sip of the too-sweet tea--just the way she liked it, and sweet enough to cause Mark to make a face when he picked up her cup by mistake. She slowly let her breath out and smiled with relief and a touch of triumph. It had worked that time. She hadn't gone back too far--her constant terror now. She took another sip then carefully set the cup carefully, making sure that it was completely on the table.

Carol looked up at the hummingbird as it sped off in a blur of emerald wings. Her smile flickered. Last time it had stayed and fed a while. Perhaps the wind was slightly different this time and brought a scent of something more appealing than stale sugar water. There was always something that changed, some randomness that she couldn't keep constant no matter how hard she tried.

Enough of that. It was just a hummingbird. She washed the cup and dried it, slowly stroking her fingers across the raised texture along the rim, a pattern of twining roses in cream on white. She'd caught up with her last go-back now--past the point where she'd begun it--and now she only had the other larger one to deal with, to finish.

She heard Mark come into the kitchen behind her as she reached to put the cup away in the cabinet.

"Here," he said, taking the cup from her hand. "Let me get that." He placed it on the high shelf then dropped his hands to her waist, caressing her through the satin of her robe. His lips nuzzled her ear, and she smiled and leaned back against him. This was how it was supposed to happen. He'd come into the kitchen before while she was putting the cup away, and he'd nuzzled her and they'd ended up on the kitchen floor.

I was right to do that small go-back, she thought as his hands explored her front. Otherwise he'd have come in while I was picking up shards and cleaning up sticky tea, and we certainly wouldn't have had sex among the porcelain fragments. It will work this time. I'll get it right.

One cup of tea was so like another, and one day was so like any other. So how was she to know, to remember, that she'd sat in the chair by the window and sipped tea more than that one time. Gazed out at the hummingbird feeder and pondered bright futures almost three years earlier. More than once, more than just that one terrible morning. It had seemed safe enough to go back to that.

The wrong morning. Too far back.

Mark held her close that night, his hand spread flat on her belly. "Maybe that was it," he said. "Wouldn't it be great if it was? What a story to tell the grandchildren: I got your gramma pregnant on the kitchen floor."

She rolled over to look at him, surprised. "I am," she said before she could censor herself.

He gave a soft laugh and slid his hand around to the small of her back, pulling her close against him. "A bit too soon to be sure, don't you think, Carol?"

No, she thought. I do know. This is the sixth time I've lived through this. Each time we've done it on the kitchen floor, I've ended up pregnant.

And each time they hadn't, each time it was someplace else besides the kitchen, or a time other than the morning, nothing had come of it, and she'd had to start all over again. Go back again and try to make it right, because the only way to go forward is to live it out.

We did it on the kitchen floor, she wanted to say, with the tile cold on my back, and you laughing and complaining about how the hard floor was bad for your knees. It was almost the same this time, except you laughed and complained about your elbows instead.

But close enough, she thought as she clung to his warmth. Surely it's close enough.

Back when she first discovered her ability, she'd tried to do what everyone dreamed of doing. Go back. Make the right investments. The right bets.

But there are more random factors in the universe than she'd ever considered. And the longer the time frame, the more random factors intruded, until it was nothing at all like the way she'd remembered it.

She lost six months of her life that way--six months that had never happened except in her memory, back during college when she first started going back. One terrible semester that she decided to do over. Just go back and start from scratch. Except she hadn't counted on all the lost experiences, things that had happened only to her and only existed in her own memory now. She even lost her best friend, Maria. She'd met Maria in the six months that never ended up happening, and though she tried to recreate the circumstances that had led to them being such good friends, it had simply never clicked the second time around.

The doctor confirmed it three weeks later, to Mark's surprise.

"How did you know?" he asked after they got home. He had a pleased smile on his face that couldn't come close to matching her delighted grin, but there was still a curious look in his eye. "You've been positive ever since that morning in the kitchen."

But she didn't make the mistake she'd made once before. Once she'd tried to explain to him what she could do, tried to prove it. He hadn't believed her, of course. How could he? And she'd gone back and gone back a half dozen times, exhausting little ten minute episodes, trying to prove it to him, getting him to guess a number and then showing that she knew it. But he'd guessed a different number each time--the random differences inherent in every go-back affecting even his thought processes. And he couldn't remember that she'd just tried to prove it to him. Each memory was wiped away every time she went back, so each time she was starting from scratch. She'd finally had him think of a number that wouldn't change, that she wouldn't also know--a friend's birthday, or a childhood address, or a combination to a lock. And even then he hadn't really believed her. How could he?

"I just wanted it so very much," she said to him this time. And it was the truth, though she could never tell him just how badly she wanted to be pregnant again, how desperately she wanted it to work this time so she could end this episode and have things return to the way they were supposed to be.

But each day was a tiny bit different. Every day more random factors intruded until there was little left that resembled that first time. The real time, before the first terrible mistake, and then her other terrible mistake.

Was it possible to grieve for something that had never happened except in her own mind? Sometimes she felt that was the hardest part--knowing that she was the only one who remembered, who knew. She had to grieve for her losses by herself. The memories of that precious smile and the delighted laugh. The bright blue eyes and the slobbery kisses. Mark had lost too, but he didn't remember. It had never happened for him. All erased in the go-back.

"You'd be immortal," Mark had said after she tried to convince him she could go back. "If it looked like you were about to die, you could go back and live your whole life over again."

Then he'd paused, his brows drawn down into a thoughtful expression. "Of course, you'd still only be immortal for the years of your normal lifespan."

Will I ever see my entire lifespan? she'd thought. Too easy to stop and go back. Too many mistakes to fix.

Time was never the same each time, she realized, she'd discovered. The atomic events, the natural radioactivity changed probabilities in a thousand different ways. Even people's thoughts were different. And, to her intense disappointment, she'd learned that betting on sports games was worthless, because the more people in the mix, the more random factors occurred. A quarterback might slip one time and not the other. The pitcher might throw a perfect curve, or the batter might gauge it perfectly this time and smack it out of the park. Or not. One time Schroedinger's cat would live, and the next it would die.

Small go-backs were safest, she'd found. Those were the most effective. The shorter the duration, the fewer random changes could intrude, and the more chance she had of changing what she wanted without too much else changing.

She'd only wanted to go back a few minutes. To that morning when she'd sipped tea and watched the hummingbird. Enough time to run upstairs and close the gate.

She didn't want to go for the ultrasound, but she had the first time, the original time, so of course she had to now. Plus Mark wanted to know so badly that she couldn't bear to disappoint him. Besides, how could she explain why she didn't want to know? It was too terrifying, too depressing. And the guilt piled even higher.

Six times now. This was the sixth time she'd lived through this episode, the sixth time she'd gone back to what she now called the beginning, the morning with the tea and the hummingbird. It was the wrong morning, but it was done, and now she had to live with it and work with it. The first two times she hadn't gotten pregnant, and she'd gone back to the "beginning" the instant she'd known it wasn't going to happen. Starting over to fix the mistake. Mistakes on mistakes.