Unhappenings (40 page)

She downed half the water in one long draw. Catching her breath, she continued.

“By 2148, that situation had changed. Carlton West had begun to dip his toe into French politics. As an American, his legal ability to influence French policy was limited, at least at first. In 2151, France suffered a major financial crisis. Her attempt to rejoin the European Union was declined by majority vote of the member states. In the wake of this crisis, the government began a slide into chaos that lasted a decade. There were power struggles, bloodless coups…” She took another sip of water. “And one coup that was not so bloodless. Long serving members of the French government were systematically swept aside, and new faces, including outsiders like Carlton West, seized the new opportunities for power. In 2162, France formed an alliance treaty with seven nations outside the EU, five of them on the Arabian Peninsula. Purges followed. There was a war.”

She stopped. All of this was history to her, and near future to me, at least from my vantage point in my own future. From 2092—home—this was all a long way off. But Athena grew up in that world. I wondered how much of her childhood it tainted. I hoped Helen and I were able to shield her from the worst of it.

“At its peak, l’Empire de la France Nouvelle covers seventy percent of the European mainland, and ten percent of Africa, as well as parts of the Middle East. As of 2175, eight hundred and twenty million people have died, either as casualties of ongoing wars, victims of purges, or sufferers of starvation and disease as entire societies have collapsed. And in 2175, l’Empereur de la France Nouvelle is Carlton West.”

“Dear God,” I whispered. Images of mass suffering paraded across my eyes, and towering over all of them, the cruel, stark silhouette of a simple baby stroller, and loving parents with no idea what they had brought into the world. “Is that the timeline you are trying to unhappen? Or fix? Is that your assignment?” Again I pictured the baby. With creeping horror, I pictured my own baby standing over him, with a knife, or a garrote.

She shook her head.

“That timeline
is
the unhappening. In the original, unaltered timeline, France was provisionally re-admitted to the EU, and recovered in disgrace, but in peace. The motion, which carried by a margin of exactly one vote, succeeded in part because of the influence of Sylvia West, a high ranking diplomat, and Carlton’s first cousin. By all accounts, in the original timeline, Carlton West was a powerful and eccentric businessman, whose oddities and occasional ambitions were tempered by his wife, a woman of ordinary breeding, and extraordinary character.” She downed the rest of her water, then poured two fingers of scotch over the remaining ice and lemon slice.

The possibility that I would black out from sheer guilt overload seemed very real at that moment.

“I did this,” I said. “I made all of that happen.”

“You did nothing of the sort. You met a magnificent woman, and you fell in love with her. More to the point, she fell in love with you. What happened after that was not in your control.” She swirled the scotch in her glass, and took a swig. “None of this is exactly what I came to tell you.”

“There’s more?” I cried. “Somehow there’s more?”

“You may want your own glass of scotch for this.”

I took my swig directly from the bottle.

“Fair enough,” she said. “Carlton West is a time traveler. He has access to the technology, although we do not yet know how he accomplished that. There is no evidence that anyone outside the Time Travel Project has successfully developed it independently. Fortunately for everyone in the world, with one exception, he has not used the technology as a combat weapon. We have even determined that absolutely no one other than he has used it. And so far, in twenty years of travel, he has only ever used it for a single purpose.”

I stared at my daughter, and found my own darkness reflected in her eyes. Helen was right. It did make her strong. “To torment me.”

“To torment you.” She took another swig. “This is what I do now, nearly every day of my life. We find an instance where Carlton has tweaked your history, and I go counter-tweak it. I work for an organization whose entire reason for existing is to right the wrongs done to you by this one person.”

“Thank you,” I said humbly.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “And I love you, and I would do this for you no matter how many people were willing to help me, so I’m just as grateful that organization exists as you are.”

“Are there other travelers? How many people do what you do?”

She looked away, sipped her whiskey.

“Including the undergrad version of you? Two.”

“What? Why?”

“Because becoming a traveler means living the rest of your life in purgatory. You and I see the world in ways no one else ever can, and it’s a curse. You know it’s a curse. No one is ever recruited to do this. There were two others before me. One died. One deserted. We never replaced them. I am on my own.”

I had no words of comfort for my daughter. Anything I could tell her she would have already known years before I ever had the chance to say it.

“Why you? Is it because you’re my daughter? Did I do this to you?”

“I did it to myself,” she said. “When I was fifteen, I stole a wrist module, because I wanted to meet… I wanted to see what you were like when you were younger. I became the girl you called Penelope. When the Project finally caught up with me, I was already a traveler. It was too late to save me, so they gave me an implant and a mission, and used what I had become to do good. It’s the same reason I recruited you to help me, when I needed an extra pair of hands. You were already in purgatory. You had nothing to lose.”

We sat in silence for a moment, as I took as much of this in, as well as I could.

“Why don’t you stop him? Right now, while he’s still powerless? Why waste your time on my problems?”

She tossed down the rest of her scotch, and poured two more fingers.

“First of all, he has never been powerless, so that’s not really an option. But the real reason is that after years of these missions, we are still trying to figure out how to fix timelines. In over 500 jumps, my success rate is less than thirty percent. Time is complicated, Dad. That thing I asked you about killing the dog? That’s the easiest decision in the world compared to the calls the Project has to make every single day.” She took another sip of her scotch. “I tried seventy-five times to save Carrie Wolfe. All I ever did was push back the date she died.” She wiped away a tear. “There are just too many variables. Too many ways to fuck up.”

“What if I break it off with Helen right now? Tell her to go back to Carlton?” Just the idea made me dizzy.

“Very noble,” said Athena, “but I’m pretty sure that window closed the moment she laid eyes on you. Like I said, it doesn’t work that way. It’s never that easy.”

Simultaneously horrified and relieved, another awful twist occurred to me.

“If we did ever correct the timeline, make him never become Emperor, if Helen and I never met,” I said, “what would happen to you?”

“To me?” she said. “I would survive. Multiple frames of reference again. Only the fact of me would be erased. The person would remain. After a fashion.”

“After a fashion?”

She shrugged, but offered no explanation.

“What if you weren’t a traveler?”

“Retroactively dead as a dishrag,” she said, and finished her second scotch. I could see the alcohol beginning to affect her body language. “You haven’t asked me the thing I was sure you were going to ask first,” she said.

I took another swig from the bottle. The scotch was hitting me, too. I was getting drunk with my daughter. Something about that made me feel very warm.

“Do I want to know the answer?”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure you do.”

I laughed, hoping we were thinking about the same thing. If not, my laughter would come back as pain. “Okay, here you go. Am I going to lose Helen? Is she going to unhappen to me?”

She shook her head. “No.”

My heart nearly exploded with joy. “Never?”

Athena waved her hands in retraction.

“Well, I mean, she could still ditch you, so don’t do anything stupid. But she can’t unhappen. That’s the one thing Carlton has never successfully changed, and believe me, he has tried. Good lord, how he has tried. But your relationship is as fixed as anything we have been able to measure. The only time he even came close was when he threw that girl Wendy into your bed. I fixed that in one try. Snapped it right back.” She snapped her fingers for clarification. “Even in that timeline you were eventually going to leave her for Mom anyway, by the way. I just made it tidier for all of you.”

I took another swig of scotch. My stomach briefly reminded me that alcohol is poisonous, but got over it. This was amazingly good news. In the face of all this uncountable horror, this was a ray of hope.

“Can I tell her?” I asked, dimly aware that I was slurring my speech.

Athena rolled her eyes. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “Why do you think I’m avoiding her today? She can’t know any of this. It would break her.”

“Even the part about her not unhappening?”

“And how would you explain that without owning why everything else unhappens?” she said. “Don’t put this on her, Dad. Let her be happy for a little while. God knows she has her own trials ahead of her.”

Struggling to find a way to ask about that, I must have reacted visibly, and probably drunkenly, to this omen, because Athena’s face suddenly sank. She looked at her empty glass.

“Damn it,” was all she said.

“What trials?” I asked as calmly as I could.

“Nope.” Said Athena, getting to her feet, more than a little wobbly. “We’re done. Give Mother my love. And sober up before she gets home.”

She blipped away without further comment.

hen Helen came home, I had dinner waiting for her. Grilled salmon, asparagus with hollandaise sauce, wild rice, white zinfandel. I was attempting to put her at ease with some of her favorite foods before revealing that our relationship was in no danger from my curse. How I would avoid telling her that my curse now had a name—and its name was Carlton West—I had yet to work out. My preparations went underappreciated, however.

The very first thing she said to me when she came in the door, after a hello kiss, was, “Have you been drinking?”

“A little,” I admitted.

“Alone?” Helen had a clear look of concern on her face, doubly so given that alcoholism was not yet on the very long list of things about me which she should reasonably have cause to monitor closely. The conversation hadn’t even started and I was already behind.

“No,” I said. “Athena was here.”

Helen’s face lit up. Then fell. “Wait. ‘Was’? She’s gone already? Poop. I wanted to see her. Did you tell her I wanted to see her?”

“I told her,” I said.

“So she popped in and you started drinking? That feels like a story with a missing scene.”

“She had a stressful day. I offered her a drink, and had one myself. Can we stop talking about this?” The defensiveness in my voice was obvious even to me, and did not help my case.

“Ooooo-kay,” said Helen. Her face lit up again. “Do I smell salmon?” I led her into the dining room, where our meals sat on plates under covers to keep them warm. When I lifted hers off, and the hollandaise and salmon scented steam rolled out, she made a little squeal of delight, clapped and pulled up her chair. She took a bite without waiting for me to sit down. We were back on track.