"Her mom divorced him. Her sister won't talk to him. He lives alone in a little apartment with all his guns."
It was a long, peaceful July evening in Sofia, and I was finally out of the hospital. I had nothing to do but regrow my internal membranes and repeat gossip about the family of an old friend. I'll call her Irene.
"It's sad," I said, "because this man spent his whole adult life building his family. Marry, buy a house, raise three daughters, and it all just falls apart."
I lay on my back on the couch in our lawn, watching the bats work against the darkly glowing sky. My daughters were inside, probably watching videos on their phones.
"Irene? Wasn't she the home-schooled girl?" asked my mom. She had flown out to help me recover. "Her family was always a little weird. Very religious."
I didn't share her disapproval. My recent contact with death had left me aware of my need for religion. It was as if a clinging sheet of plastic had been pulled off my face, and I could no longer ignore the things that mattered.
"Yes," I said. "Weird. Someone said something a bit too extreme, and the normal people went to find another church. That would leave a group that was less normal on average. Now someone else would say something more extreme and the community would get even smaller.”
Pavlina knocked her wine glass against the arm-rest of her chair. "Brain Drain. When everyone who's smart and ambitious leaves, you get," she said, "what's left."
We three sat there, considering the fact that we were in Bulgaria. My mom had been horrified by the black mold growing on the bathroom walls of my room at the hospital. She didn't even know yet that my second surgery had only been necessary because of a doctor's mistake after the first one.
I was past caring about that. Leaning on my rack of fluid-filled bags, learning how to walk again, I had asked myself "why did this happen?" "Because one molecule bumped," into another was like trying to eat sand. "Because your enemies attacked you," was like drinking lye. I’d spent a month reading Terry Pratchett and watching the kestrels that nested in the hospital's neglected attic. I was glad to be in Bulgaria. Also, if I'd gotten a colostomy in the US, the medical bill would have bankrupted us.


"Heart Drain," I said. "It wasn't the smart ones who left Irene's father's church, it was the good ones. The people who stayed were like a tide pool in the sun. They got saltier and saltier."
If my mother and wife rolled their eyes at me, I didn't see it. The sky was darker now and the bats were hard to make out.
"Well, I'm glad she's out of it at least," said my mom. "How is Irene's baby? Say hi to her for me."
Except Irene wasn't out of it, at least from my perspective.
Irene and I kept in touch for years, writing long emails and critiquing each other's stories. I must have sent her hundreds of thousands of amateurish words, but by the time I got to my first published book, something had started to go wrong.
"He likes her because she doesn't remind him of his EX-WIFE?" Irene wrote in the all-caps of outrage. "She reacts to the oppression of the patriarchy by feeding into their classification of her as a child?" She told me I was infantilizing a black character because he was short and had a round face.
I didn't know what to do. Irene was reading my work like she was a censor, but I couldn't tell her that. I didn't want to be mean, and also I was starting to understand that to push back against a certain type of comment might be a career-limiting move. In the end, I couldn't bear to send her my manuscripts. We would talk about other things.
My readers will know that selective silence wasn't enough. Irene's increasingly extreme ideology infected everything we talked about. Food, gardening, our children. Her final email told me how much Irene limited her son's screen time and why that was so important. I read it, stumbled downstairs, yelled at my daughters who were of course staring at their phones, and realized that I had a problem. I had to leave this conversation.
For about five years, I only handled the internet with tongs. My app-blocker was strict. My emails were terse. My posts avoided readers, because readers might comment. I kept my head down and told myself that I still had my agent, my publisher, my colleagues. I would work and that would be enough.
My readers will know that it wasn't. My agent became more demanding and my publisher colder. Every science fiction convention was worse than the last. My fellow writers were angrier, pettier, more likely to end your career for you.
I once asked a stranger at a con what the badges on his lanyard stood for. "Well of course I declared my gender," he said, pointedly. "Why wouldn't you?"
I nodded silently. And I left. I stopped going to conventions. In the words of one of my colleagues, why would I pay to spend time with people who hate me? I hear that subsequent cons have become absolutely unbearable. It's not worth reading much traditionally published genre fiction, either. Heart Drain has hit scifi hard.
None of this is news to anybody, but now we get to my question for you, my readers. What do we do now?
What attracted me to the Literary Right was its kindness and generosity. Come to us and say what you're thinking. We'll disagree with you, and then we'll get back to writing. Now, based on the essays of JE Tabor and John Carter, I wonder if I was naive. If I say the wrong thing to you, will you try to get me fired? Harass my colleagues? Get my books pulled? If I suspect you might, and if others suspect it, you won’t be able to have honest conversations any more. If you become powerful enough to threaten the rest of us, we’ll go along with it, nodding silently, until we leave.
Imagine us in another ten years. Will we be surrounded by fractious, squabbling, honest fellow writers, or will we be alone in our small apartments, surrounded by our weapons?

On the way to the village we came to a line of stopped cars.
"Uh oh," I said, and started up Waze in irritation, thinking it was surprise roadwork like last year.
A few cars reversed and turned around, but soon enough the line started moving again. A couple of cars and a truck had pulled onto the side of the road, and we could just get on with our weekend. People on their phones stood around someone on the ground, tangled with his bicycle, bleeding from his head.
"It's an accident," I told told Pavlina as we drove past. "His head is bleeding."
"Should I stop? I can't stop." But a slowed and turned onto a side road into a wheat field.
"You should stop here," I said. "Should I stay in the car with the girls?" Another moment of cowardice on my part.
I might have just stayed in the car looking at my phone if Pavlina hadn't called me. I answered, but she didn't say anything. She wanted me to dig the first aid kit out of the back of the car, but someone else had already given her one, but I didn't know that. I didn't know what was going on, so I left Maggie and Ellie in the car and walked up the road toward the accident, trying foolishly to call Pavlina back.
A wheat field on the left, an embankment full of scrub and litter, and Pavlina kneeling over the cyclist, holding up his head as he took powerful, wet breaths. He was skinny, sallow, maybe in his late twenties, lying on his side with his limbs curled.
I saw what Pavlina was trying to do - keep him on his side so the blood would drain out of his nose and mouth. I squatted down and put my hands on his shoulder and hip. What if his spine was damaged? It didn't seem to be. He didn't seem to be injured anywhere except his head. A gash on his left temple and blood in his nose, but not enough to account for the amount on the asphalt.
I held him there, keeping him from rolling onto his back, while the people standing around us called 112 over and over. "No, he can't walk. We're on Chepintsko Shose. They hung up! Where's the ambulance? It wasn't a car. A dog jumped out at him. I called for an ambulance ten minutes ago!"
Every so often the cyclist would groan and try to move, but we kept him on his side. I let go of his hip and clasped his hand. He squeezed back. His nails were pared very short, but not chewed.
"It's all right," Pavlina told him. "The ambulance is coming. Lie down." She put a water bottle to his mouth, but he was in no state to drink. His face was long and bony, with the beaked nose that's common here. There wasn't much smell. A bit of blood, a bit of sweat. It would have been stronger in a boxing ring.
I'd been squatting too long. My legs hurt, and they kept hurting even when I stood up and stretched them. The cyclist began to move and I squatted again to hold him. We repeated this dance two or three times before I realized I could just put my knees on the ground. So I knelt there, thinking "I'd better remember this. This is the most exciting thing that's happened to me this month."
The police arrived. I was a bit wary, thinking they might stomp around, demanding to see everyone's ID cards. But no. The two policemen left the handling of the cyclist to me and Pavlina while they directed traffic around us and joined the civilians in berating the emergency phone operators.
I have actually talked with someone who was hired by the municipal government a few years ago to reform Sofia's ambulance dispatch system. I would say he didn't reform it enough. As for the police, they were, as Pavlina said, "trained to stop barroom fights," but not in CPR. We continued to kneel on the ground, holding the cyclist.
He pushed against me, trying to sit up again. I was still vaguely worried about "not moving the patient," but I couldn't press him down. I supported him as he rose, bringing into view the gash on the left side of his head. It had stopped bleeding, but for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to wrap his head in gauze. I tried one-handed, fumbling, supporting him and chasing the little roll of cotton as it unspooled on the ground, aware that I was being foolish, but unable to find anything more sensible to do. Blood was coming out of his ear.
The cyclist wiped at his nose. He vomited a thin, brick-colored liquid, and lay back, breathing more easily. Someone found a piece of Styrofoam on the side of the road and Pavlina put it under his head as a pillow.
He slipped deeper into unconsciousness. One of the onlookers asked about his pulse, and after trying a couple different grips on his wrist, I put two fingers under his jaw. The pulse wasn't strong, but it was steady under his clammy skin.
His hands were cold, too. Goosebumps on his forearm. I took a moment to compose the sentence in Bulgarian. "It is cold to him," rather than "he is cold," which would imply something about his character. "Is there a blanket?" I asked.
"Does someone have a blanket?" Pavlina said more loudly.
I switched to English. "Your jacket." She'd forgotten about the cardigan tied around her waist. We draped it over him.
Finally we heard the siren of the ambulance. It parked next to me and a single EMT, a middle-aged woman, got out. She didn't ask questions and she couldn't lift the cyclist onto the gurney. I and two of the bystanders lifted him, raised the gurney, and docked it. The cyclist slid into the ambulance, lying on his back, clutching Pavlina's cardigan.
"Do you want me to get your jacket?" I asked her.
"No," she said. "Let him have it. I hope he wakes up and it confuses him."
I haven't been able to find any reports on this traffic accident. The cyclist's wallet and cell phone were in a pouch on his bike, but I didn't look in his wallet and the cell phone was locked. The police said they'd answer it if it rang.
I won't know what happened to this guy, but I think his prospects weren't bad. He had a concussion, obviously, and he went into shock, but he did finally end up in a hospital, and his breathing and pulse were all right. In the end, that's all I know. That, and the knowledge that although I had the urge to tell Pavlina to keep on driving, and another urge to stay in the car and not help, I did the right thing. Next time, I'll be a bit quicker.
Book reviews and writing news will come next week.
See you then.

I was reading Garrison Keillor's Substack, and inspiration struck me. So surprise and happy February. Here's a very short story.
~~~
Once upon a time there was a Democrat Mouse. They lived in a big city with excellent public transportation and plenty of vegan restaurants. Their incisor teeth were filed down and their fur was styled in the most supportive patterns and colors. And yet, they felt something was missing from their life.

In the suburb of that same city, where the gas was cheap and the sidewalks nonexistent, there lived a Republican Mouse. He went to the gym every day to pull heavy weights and practice biting. His teeth were stronger and yellower than anyone's, but he couldn't ignore a certain longing.

Life felt stale, crusted, empty of nourishment. Things couldn't go on like this. A change of scenery might offer a solution, or at least a distraction.

And so, the Democrat Mouse and the Republican Mouse decided to take a vacation. Not together, of course. They shared no acquaintances and had no forums in common. They simply set out on the same day, each mouse headed toward the home of the other. In the middle, they met.

What a freak, thought the Republican Mouse. She's shaved off half her fur and dyed the other half green. And all those tattoos. Filed her teeth down? Is this what mice are turning into? Grandpa was right.

And the Democrat Mouse looked at the Republican Mouse, thinking, I'm in danger. Look at those muscles. Look at those teeth. Those mean little eyes. That mouse could run me down and bite right through my spine. I've read about how that happens.

They froze, bristling.

If I call the police, thought the Democrat Mouse, they'll be on his side. They'll help him eat me.

If she takes a picture of me, thought the Republican mouse, that's it. Life over. Nobody will hire me and I'll starve.

In the windows of the houses and apartments around them, blinds twitched. Camera lenses pointed, and behind those lenses crouched yet more mice. They watched in their millions, waiting for something —anything! —to end.

Halloween is not a universal instinct. It is a learned behavior practiced by a specific human community at a particular time in their history. Therefor, it is not worthy of discussion.
 
"Mr. Grumbles, make a fire," said the raven perched on a troll's shoulder. His name was General Graa.1
 
"I will skewer snacks for roasting," said the giant spider, whom we shall call Hostess.
 
"Let me gather rocks to heat for a mud-bath," said the bug-eyed monster, Twine.
 
"A lovely idea," said Digeridoo the sea-beast. "I'll dig out a wallow for us."
 
And the killer space-robot spoke thoughtfully, his communication laser-fire rendered into comprehensible sound by the translator bugs hovering by or clinging to each of the gathered friends. "A fire." The robot's name was Arch-Beacon Clay. "I appreciate the symbolism. Graa, I will help you with a well-chosen word."
 
Graa understood what Clay was about to do and pecked his hairy steed in the cheek. "Mr. Grumbles, full retreat!"
 
The domesticated Homo erectus stumbled back from the pile of kindling just in time to avoid the burning light that blazed forth from Clay.
 
"Fire!" communicated Clay, and there was fire.
 
It was fall in the Zogreion. Specifically, in the nature reserve north and west of the city. Here, Twine's species had not converted the land into artificial mangrove swamp, but left it as a forest.
 
The trees had turned dark and glassy as their leaves withdrew into their trunks, and unharvested reproductive netting littered the ground with orange tangles and curds. Quad-wing fliers called to each other as they soared south. A distant aircraft glowed pink with the light of a sun hidden behind the rim of this version of earth.
 
The five friends had no reason to gather and talk, and that was exactly why they enjoyed it. Tonight they would not have to negotiate or charm. They could relax, set aside diplomacy and trade, and speak of more important things.
 
"Have any of you seen the most recent broadcast of Heavy Bombardment?" asked Digeridoo.
 
Graa nibbled on his steed's ear as he added more wood to the fire. "Is that the prequel series? My secretaries won't stop talking about it."
 
"Yes!" squealed Twine around the rock in her mouth. "Are your secretaries Team Ceres or Team Eris? I'm Team Eris all the way. Woo! Boost that ice! Right?"
 
"Right!" Under the mobile web of Hostess the spider, puppets dangled. One of them was shaped like Twine.2 Hostess manipulated this puppet, saying "Scatter those tholins!"
 
With a bird-shaped puppet, however, she whispered an aside to Graa. "It's not as good as the original series, but I feel I have to keep up with it so I have something to talk to people about."
 
Arch-beacon Clay sadly flickered his lasers. "I stopped watching Tensor fiction broadcasts a long time ago. It is as if the writers have never talked to a real person. It is as if they have lost their grip on meaning."
 
"They are not paid to grip meaning," said Graa. "The show's writers are paid to extrude stories that the audience enjoys."
 
"Yes." Digeridoo spoke out of the hole he was excavating in the forest floor. "You're overthinking, Clay. Just lie back and let the show wash over you. It doesn't have to make sense. It's just fun."
 
"Don't you want something deeper?" asked Clay.
 
Digeridoo stopped digging, closed his eyes and nostrils, and hugged himself with all four flippers. "No. There are things swimming in deep places."
 
"Don't scare him," chided Hostess.
 
Graa stretched his neck and raised his wings. "Belay that order!"
 
Clay played lidar up and down Graa's feathered body. "You mean I should scare Digeridoo?"
 
"Yes!" Graa paced back and forth across his steed's padded shoulder. "Fear is precisely the reason I invited you to this campfire gathering at the tipping point of autumn."
 
"I thought you invited us so that we could roast treats over the fire," said Hostess. She manipulated threads, and clockwork arms hammered skewers of food into the ground.
 
"Treats are only my secondary goal," said Graa.
 
Digeridoo upended his tank of camping water into the hole he'd made. "You had an ulterior motive," he accused. "A trick!"
 
Graa's throat-feathers bristled in smugness. "Now tell me: what scares you?"
 
Silence around the campfire. Night creatures pipped to each others. Migrating fliers cried. The friends considered whether they were friendly enough to talk about this sort of thing.
 
"I will lead the attack!" Graa crowed. "Now hear this! I am scared of food. I command you to imagine it!"
Hostess visibly obeyed, releasing ratchets and tugging threads in her complex web to trigger memories and run simulations. The others just sat there, brains presumably working. Digeridoo closed his eyes.
 
"You're perched above the carcass," said Graa. "You are entranced by the pattern of its blood on the snow. Vapors still rise from it. The meat is fresh! But this means that whatever killed the meat will still be near."
As he talked, Graa lost his dominant posture. His feathers smoothed down and he tucked his wings tight to his sides. His voice took on the harsh qworks and triple-raks of fear.
 
"If I stoop upon the meat, what will stoop upon me? How dare I? How dare I eat?" Graa huddled on his steed's shoulder. The domesticated Homo erectus whined and put his hand around his rider.
 
Hostess shook her legs, rattling all four of her puppets. "Thank you for that tasty offering. I'll offer you my fear next: I'm scared that I'm not attractive."
 
"Oh no, don't say that," said Twine. She rolled her rock, now heated, from the fire toward Digeridoo's mud bath. "You're very attractive."
 
The rock went kshh and Digeridoo snorted in appreciation.
 
"Thank you." The spider manipulated her puppets to give the various species' equivalents of appreciative bows. "You have all joined me for a meal, and I am grateful. But what about next time? Or the time after that? Every day I grasp my web and take up my puppets and wait for guests to come. I do my best to appeal to the widest range. I craft the most convincing decoys I can. But some days, my number of guests falls. What if it falls to zero? Someday it must, and what will I do when I have no one to mimic? Alone, who will I be?"
 
"Interesting that your fear is loneliness," said Graa, who had calmed himself and his steed. "I would have thought you would be more afraid of being eaten by birds."
 
Hostess twitched a leg, and one of her puppets flapped papier-mâché wings. "I have better ways to feed birds, my friend. Would you like a roasted fruit or a heated strip of meat?"
 
Graa flapped down to grab both and cached them away where no-one else could see. "Who's next?"
 
Twine twitched her single eye and raised her mouth above the mud-bath to chitter. "I am scared of staying huddled in my hive. Seeing the same clone-sisters every day, speaking about nothing that everyone does not already know. Forgetting the cold outside. And when the cold comes inside, I will not know how to fight it."
 
Lasers sparkled from the anti-gravity cylinder that housed Arch-beacon Clay. "You and I are two ends of a tether, Twine. You fear falling in toward the heat, but I fear flying outward into the cold. Will I be unable to tolerate others? Will I throw away all my bindings and tumble, alone forever?"
Hostess scuttled across her web and spun a symbolic thread linking it to Clay's cylinder.
 
"Thank you," said the space-robot.
 
"I wish I could feed you," said the spider.
 
Clay spun himself, sparkling in his anti-gravity vacuum cylinder. "I absorb some energy from the fire, but what you give me is something better."
 
"It's gotten dark," said Digeridoo, who was uncomfortable with emotional vulnerability.
 
"That's the whole point of a campfire," said Twine. "We create a warm brightness to form the heart of a little hive, safe from the cold outer darkness."
 
"Safe," said Hostess. "Exactly."
 
Graa growled. "And yet there are treasures in the darkness, aren't there? To grab them, we must ride out. We must follow our fear, as if led by the pole."
 
Clay understood, but those species without a magnetic sense required a little more clarification.
"You think we should be led by our fear?" said Digeridoo. "Find things that scare you and then do them? That sounds foolish and dangerous. And I don't like all these metaphors."
 
Twine vibrated her eyeball. "What danger? We are sophonts! We habitually leap between universes. We fear no predators. No starvation."
 
"That's evidence in favor my argument," said Digeridoo. He was a bit hurt at Twine's aggressive tone. Hadn't he dug out all this nice mud for her? "We do not need to venture from our burrows in order to find food. We can stay safe, and let what we need come to us."
 
"I confess I do like that idea," said Hostess the spider.
 
Graa gave a kek kek kek call of frustration. "There the food lies, steaming in the snow below you. You hunger, you rage, you fear the glint of eyes in the darkness: predation. But you should also fear the rush of many wings coming up behind: starvation."
 
"Metaphors again!" Digeridoo snorted. "Do I have to re-tune my translator?"
Clay extended robot claws from his spherical shell. "You mean if you do not overcome your fear and snatch your prize, other people will steal it."
 
"Exactly," said Graa.
 
"You speak like someone who doesn't trust your neighbors," said Twine.
 
"Yes. How many of us are killed by predators or natural disaster? How many of us are killed by each other? Why did we evolve intelligence in the first place. Not to outsmart hawks or blizzards, but to outsmart other sophonts."
 
"You mean," said Hostess, "that we are our own monsters."
 
"Yes!" Graa spread his tail, feathers on his legs and heads fluffy with dominance. "I win this conversation!"
Clay spoke in a low-wattage murmur. "And yet you are the one who invited us here."
 
Graa's feathers slimmed back down. "When the idea caught my eye, at first I blinked. My pride raised its wings, but behind those wings was fear. I recognized the fear, and oriented myself against it. I rode out to this campground, and I perch now before people not of my species. That is what a brave bird does."
 
Twine's puppet bird gave the equivalent of applause while Clay aimed a laser at Digeridoo.
 
"You accepted the invitation as well."
 
"The queen says I need to get out more," grunted sea-beast.
 
"They are expanding the burrow," explained Twine. "Digeridoo's colony needs money, as does my hive. This is
why we network."
 
"Ah," sighed the spider. "Networking."
 
"I was most surprised of all to find you here, Hostess" Clay confessed. "Isn't it very difficult for you to travel from your restaurant?"
 
Hostess moved her space-robot puppet in the equivalent of a nod. There was even a little electric light that flashed like a laser.
 
"There is always a moment of terror when my web moves," she said. "Digeridoo might feel the same way flying, or Graa trapped in a watery burrow. Or in free fall..." She flashed her electric light again. "Clay, do you feel that terror when you look down, and see the ground does not move beneath you?"
 
"I confess that I do."
 
"And yet you're here with us."
 
"And you've been to space."
 
"Oh," said Digeridoo. "Space. I remember. Yes, that trip was terrifying, but nothing I've seen was more beautiful."
Graa made a kek kek sound. "Alright! I accept your challenge! Next time, we can meet in a burrow."
 
 
 
1 The troll's name was Mr. Grumbles.
 
2 A one-eyed vacuum-cleaner with legs.

This story was originally published on Royal Road

Alright, here we go!
My speculative-evolution serial novel Fellow Tetrapod is finally live on Royal Road.
Go check it out. If it looks like your sort of thing, follow the story. It updates every weekday.

(if you want to know more...)
Koenraad Robbert Ruis used to be a paleontologist, but now he's a cook at the United Nations embassy to the Convention of Sophonts. His bosses must negotiate with intelligent species from countless alternate earths, and Koen must make them breakfast. It turns out, though, that Koen is rather better at inter-species communication than any other human in this world (all nine of them). Everyone loves to eat (certain autotrophs excepted).
Fellow Tetrapod is an speculative-evolution office comedy about food preparation, diplomacy, and what it’s like to be a talking animal.

Serialized every weekday on Royal Road  and (one week earlier) Patreon

​Cover art by Simon Roy. Illustrations by Tim Morris.

The taser fits right in my hand: light as a pack of cigarettes and cool as a sleeping beetle.
“Press the button,” says the man from the future.
I press it and the taser spits a fat blue spark. Pigeons flee over the bazaar at Future Pier and I laugh out loud.
It’s the spring of 1930, with grass blades peeking out of the mud and the kind of Chicago air that you might like to swim up into.
“Rudolf’ll be sore when he finds us,” Billy frets.
I give my little brother a pat on his cap and glance around the bazaar for signs of the approach of any son of a meat-magnate. “You let me handle Rudolf, kid.”
“And he’ll tell Mother.”
“I’ll handle Mother too.”
Billy gives me a dubious look.
“I will,” I tell him.
In fact what I intend is avoiding Mother entirely during the Preunion party. Afterward I’ll escape her house and go frolic at liberty through the seedy underbelly of Chicago. When I return home safely on the day after tomorrow, Mother will be so impressed at my foresight and self-reliance, she’ll have no choice but to cut the apron strings.
Billy isn’t done whining. “I don’t like that dingus, Ruth. Who do you need to give the electric cure, anyhow? You could knock somebody up with that thing.”
“Um,” says the man from the future. “What. No?”
“He means kill someone,” I translate.
“Oh. Naw. Hurts like fuck, though.” The man grins at our expressions. “That’s the way we talk where I come from, kids.”
The salesman’s fresh complexion and the zipper on his cardigan make him look like a kid himself. And not a rich one, judging by the blue canvas pants with the rips across their knees. He doesn’t act like a street urchin, though. He acts like a grifter.
“Now,” says the man from the future, “if you guys do want to kill somebody, I stock a little magic trick that’ll be illegal as soon as your government finds out about it…”
Billy grimaces as if someone has snuck a slingshot onto the school yard. “You can’t sell deadly weapons to girls.”
“What? Where’s the girl?” The salesman squints at me. “He mean you? You told me you were 19.”
“You bet I did,” I say. “And I was on the up and up.”
The man from the future scowls. “Shit, you Up-timers. Learn to speak modern English.”
That comes out “learn-na speak marrern Ing-lish.” Some kind of English this mug speaks.
“I’ll take the taser,” I enunciate clearly, “if you would be so kind as to sell it to me, sir.”
The grifter’s shoulders move. “That’ll be 5 dollars.”
Billy whistles. “You could eat out for a week on that.”
I pat my coat’s pockets. We’re both dressed for the party with our up-time relatives, me in my cloche hat and evening dress under the coat that’s almost too heavy the weather, Billy in a more fashionable cap and cardigan. The knee-socks spoil the look, though.
“Why do you want that taser dingus anyhow?” he whines.
“Why, to grill five sacks of hamburgers,” I say, “with onions and pickles. What do you think I need it for?” I find my roll of cash, peel off a bill, and hand it to the grifter.
“Awesome,” he says. “Anything else I can interest you in? If you’re into personal defense, I’ve got mace, keychain weapons, Swiss army knives…”
I don’t see any maces or chains. Or the Swiss army, neither, but before I can ask for clarification, Billy tugs on my sleeve.
“Don’t run away, Ruth.”
I sigh. Billy found out about my run-away plan this morning, when he saw that roll of cash.
“I’ll only be gone for a night or two,” I tell him. “And dummy up about it.”
“What’s the point if you’ll only be gone a day?”
“You want me to stay away forever? And I said dummy up.”
Billy’s voice drops to an agonized whisper. “But Mother says the streets full of down-time disintegrators and ray-guns getting sold to malcontents and agitators.”
I hold up the taser. “Maybe I’m looking forward to doing some agitating of my own, hey?”
I put the taser down, though, and wipe the smile off my face, when I see Rudolf.
“Ruth,” my suitor slips through the crowd with the determination of a spawning trout. The face of one, too. “Billy. There you are.”
“Rudolf.” I mutter the down-time merchant’s vulgar word and stuff the cash and the taser into my pockets. “There you are. Because we have also been looking for you.”
Rudolf stares me in the eye and smiles with his lower lip. Maybe he’s trying to tell me something with that look he’s giving me, or maybe it’s just gas. It’s hard to tell with him.
Rudolf Bleirer is the son of a baron of sausages, and has spent the fall and winter asked me to marry him on a more or less weakly schedule. I would be more flattered at his persistence if it weren’t so clear that he’s only after my family’s political influence.
Since, for her part, Mother is only interested in his family’s money, she guesses it’s a match made in heaven. She’s the one who told Rudolf to help me fetch party guests from Future Pier, maybe hoping the task would require the boy to demonstrate his marriageable qualities.
“We’re to meet our guests over there, hey?” I point down the peir and Rudolf’s eyes track the movement as if he’s about to flick out his tongue and swallow my hand.
“Yeah,” says Billy, “let’s blouse. I want to meet my future self.”
The salesman shakes his head, mutters something about blouses, and turns to fleece some other natives of 1930.

The time trains arrived just after Black Tuesday, and they saved us. Investors and humanitarians from the 22nd century dumped cash on the banks, stopped the trusts from crashing any further, and gave us the knowledge and technology to transform our world and rewrite our old destiny.
Their “railroad” sits within a circular, concrete platform at the end of Future Pier. It’s a cage composed of pipes that might be porcelain, except they glimmer with soap-bubble colors. No matter where you stand, the opposite side of the cage seems to vanish off into the distance.
“I can’t wait to meet my future self,” says Billy while I peer into the depths of time and potential.
“From what I understand, the people from down time are only what we might become,” corrects Rudolf, the tedious bore. “It is better to consider them as coming from another country.”
Sure. Another country. A country whose books contain between 45 and 203 years of extra history. There is some confusion about what the future people are doing here, since nothing they do in our version of 1930 will change anything about their own past. Mother says it’s something to do with tax-free import and export.
Rudolf takes out a cigarette and lights it. “Want one?” he asks.
“No thanks,” I say, looking past him at a row of bill-boards filled with futurese gibberish. “Bao’an’s multi-UI-e-cigarettes! Personal Maglev Packs! S. electrogenisis cultures Utility fog! Now in a can!”
“Would you like to buy something from the bazaar?” Asks Rudolf, bland as a butter sandwich.
I look sidewise at him. “No,” I say. “I didn’t come here to shop.”
Rudolf seems to accept that. He either doesn’t know I’m playing him, or else he just doesn’t care. “Your coat and hat are quite fine.”
The coat with the money and the weapon. I don’t know whether that remark was meant to be ominous, polite, or only dull. They all sound the same, coming out of Rudolf.
“It’s my driving outfit,” I answer.
Rudolf’s eyes go unfocused as he considers my response. “And where is your chauffeur?”
“I drove here myself,” I say. Over Mother’s objections, but she was too busy with preunion preparations to really stop me. It’s another reason why today is an excellent day to go camp out in Chicago. After I meet my future relatives, of course. A girl’s got her curiosity.
“You like to drive?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say from the depths of boredom and despair.
“Ah,” he says, staring at me. “Very good.”
My sanity is preserved by a violation of space and time. The soapy white cage emits a gong sound and a blast of cold air. Rainbow light shines through mist that wasn’t there a moment ago and my sense of down tips giddily outward. I stumble, and when I look up, the mist is parting over the smooth snout of a time train’s engine.
Another gong sound, and an oddly-accented voice speaks out of nowhere. “The Centuries Unlimited, now arriving at Black Station.”
The porcelain cage is only about five yards wide, but somehow the whole train fits inside, its silvery length tapering off to some distance you can’t properly call “up” or “down” or even “away.” “Thence,” I suppose.
From just this side of thence-ward, then, passengers begin to disembark.
I put my hand on Billy’s shoulder. “Would you look at that? Wouldn’t it be grand to take a ride on one of those things?”
Billy isn’t listening to me. He’s scanning the faces of passengers. “Hey,” he says, and stands up on his tip-toes to wave. “I think that’s me!”
I expected Billy’s downtime doppelganger to look like my father, but the man who walks up to us is older than my father. This “William” is like an uncle I never had: a pouchy, balding fellow in a funny green and red uniform. He looks tired, but that may just be from the train ride. I wonder how long it took? How many hours are there between 1930 and the 1960s?
“Ruth,” William’s eyes go wide when he sees me. “How young you are. You’re just a girl.” He stands there, staring at me as if either I’m made of glass or he is.
I put out my free hand and yell, “Shake, sit, roll over!”
Billy laughs at the familiar joke, and William’s eyes go misty at a memory decades behind him. He grasps my hand and squeezes. He’s real, all right, a man from the 1960s with a grip as doughy as an accountant’s.
“I’m glad,” William swallows. “I’m so glad to see you again, Ruth. And looking so well. So happy.”
“Happy to meet you, hey.” I say, a bit up in the air. Are those tears in his eyes?
“Is that…” William squints past me, “Rudolf? Rudolf Bleirer?” He looks from the meat magnate’s son to me
and his expression goes from joyfully sad to shocked and mad. “What is he doing here, Ruth?”
Billy gasps at the rudeness of his older self, but Rudolf just blinks.
I guess that leaves me to answer the question. “Rudolf’s here to fetch the other guests,” I say. “He brought his own car.”
“Then I’ll ride with you.” William turns away from Rudolf and winks at Billy. “I’d like to be beside myself.”
Billy giggles and everyone relaxes but me. I’m wondering what happened – will happen? Is fated to happen? – between my little brother and the man Mother wants me to marry. I pat the taser in my pocket and decide not to worry.
“Ah,” says William after a Rudolf-less walk back down Future Pier and through the bazaar. “Our good old Imperial Landau.”
“Imperial” is the right word for it. The car is slow, safe, and eye-wateringly ostentatious. You can see why Mother would like it. Me, though, I want a Duesenberg. Something that flies.
“Hello there, old boy.” William runs his fingertips down the Landau’s hood and smiles sadly at me. “I remember you used to love driving this thing.”
“I still love to drive it.” I glare at Billy, who’s giggling again. “And I’m good at it, too.”
William squints at me before memory dawns. “Oh, that’s right. Our first joyride was in ’29, wasn’t it?” He taps the scratch on the Landau’s right front fender. “It was not to be our last encounter with Mrs. Allais’ mailbox, either.” His avuncular chuckle joins the merriment already underway from Billy. “I remember you told me you’d been driving before, but that was your first time, wasn’t it?”
You’d been driving? The fate of our language was worse than I thought.
I sniff. “I read books on driving.” I unlock the driver’s side door. “And anyhow I’m much better at it now than back in the fall.”
Billy gets into the car. “This is screwy,” he says. “We both remember Mrs. Allais’ mailbox, but you don’t remember this meeting we have today?”
“Your life departed from canonical history the day the time trains came.” William says, and slides in after Billy. “I grew up, went to war, and had all sorts of trouble before I married. Trouble I trust you will avoid.”
Billy quizzes William about his wife and children as the Landau wallows out of its parking spot. I feel like I’m piloting the like the imperial barque of a pharaoh.
“My sons might already be at the house,” says William. “They and the counterparts of my grandchildren from the stations down time from mine: Denise and Old Denise and Very Old Denise…” Another chuckle. “And the Cheryls. Oh my. What characters they are. What characters.”
I picture the time trains and their rail system, with stations at every generation between now and 2132. “How about people from the end of the line?” I ask.
“The Present, you mean? Yes,” says William. “I believe both Very Very Old Kisha and Emulated Gavrail have sent in their RSVPs.”
“Funny names they have down in the future,” says Billy.
“My boy, you don’t know the half of it,” says William. “Not the half of it.”
I focus on steering this land-yacht. There’s a certain type who lets this sort of “canonical history” get to him. The kind of guy who digs into what would have happened if the time trains had never come: the Great Depression, World War Two, and all. I think it’s a morbid and pointless obsession. Whatever happens, now that we’ve got a pipeline to the future, it’ll be a lot stranger than any old war.
We sail in stately sloth through the bazaar and into the city proper. Ranks of windows line the gray faces of skyscrapers. Cars run up and down boulevards as wide as all our possibilities. The wind reaches in through the open window and plays with my hair as I press on the accelerator.
“How different your Chicago is from mine,” says William. “So much smaller! But, I think, more hopeful?”
“Who cares about the dumb old city?” says Billy. “What will my kids be like?”
William harrumphs. “In fact, we don’t know anything about your potential children, Billy, as I’ve been saying.”
“I mean your kids.”
“Ah. Elmo and Ignacio, you mean. Why, they became members of the government of the Nuclear Commons. That’s my country.”
“The Nucle-what? That’s not a real country,” says Billy.
“well, for me, the time trains arrived in 1962. That was five years ago, and a great deal has changed since then,” says William.
“What’s changed?”
William tells Billy about “force shields,” and “the power of the atom,” and “the value of labor,” but I care less about the politics of William’s 1960s station than the people I can see here on the streets of Chicago, doing their business and living their lives. Enjoying their freedom.
The traffic tugs me as if I were swimming in a river before it becomes a waterfall. Not that I’ve ever swum in a river, or even seen a waterfall. All the more reason to fling myself into this one.
“It’s my turn now,” I say.
“Beg pardon?” asks William.
“I mean,” I stammer, “how about my future, hey?”
William is silent for just a little too long, and when he speaks, it isn’t to answer my question.
“Ruth, I’m planning to ask your mother to let you come work with me. We need skilled young people in the Nuclear Commons.”
I consider the offer as I swerve around some dope in a Studebaker. Once I’m back in the clear, I decide I would prefer to have a little fun before I’m passed from one minder to another.
“Mother won’t agree to anything like that.” It’s a good excuse, and it happens to be true.
“I’ll tell your mother that life in my station, that is to say, my historical era, is much better than here,” William declares. “We have more and safer food, better medicine, machines that wash your clothes…”
What do I look like, a servant? “How about flying cars?” I ask.
“Yes, in fact,” says William. “We import maglev cars from stations further down time, but I’m personally in favor of field-supported vehicles, which we can produce locally.”
I stopped listening at the word “yes.” “They dear, these flying cars?” I ask.
“Well,” says William. “A maglev car would cost about as much as however much you paid for this Landau, I suppose.”
“Wow,” says Billy. “Flying cars! Imagine that, Ruth!”
I do. I imagine the skies over Chicago filled with flying cars, with me in the fastest one.
“Ah, yes,” says William. “My sister used to love flying, too.”
As much as it tickles me to hear little-kid slang like ‘love flying’ coming out of this old bird’s mouth, I don’t like the melancholy in William’s voice. “You mean I don’t love to fly any more in the future?”
“Not you,” he says, too quickly. “Your canonical counterpart. She…she stopped flying, yes.”
“Why?” I ask, worried. It would be one thing to never get the chance to fly. But to start and then stop?
“William?” says Billy as the old man’s silence stretches.
William sighs. “I will tell you, Ruth. Not now, though. Not here.”
“Nobody here in the car but us,” I say.
“I promised Mother she gets to hear the future news first.”
The way he says “Mother,” I know I can’t change William’s mind.
“Then promise me,” I say. “After you talk with Mother, you’ll come find me and you’ll tell me my fate.”
“Not your fate, Ruth,” he says and I hear in his tone, I hope. “But I promise I will tell you what happened to your counterpart. In good time.”
“‘Good time,'” I say. “Cute.”
William doesn’t laugh.

Our house is an elegant, stately Victorian on a street of elegant, stately Victorians, the big, peak-roofed gingerbreaded fruits of an orchard with pretensions. The street is packed with cars and arriving guests.
The party fills the living and dining rooms and the foyer in between with future relations and 1930s high society. Jenkins and the special staff hired for today hustle back and forth, exchanging coats for canapes and flutes of newly-legalized champagne.
William introduces me to his son Elmo, a sunburned and handsome young jasper with wild eyes, who’s talking about something called “marketing” with “Old Elmo” and “Very Old Elmo,” his gray-haired and no-haired future counterparts.
Elmo’s wife looks daggers at her husband as she tries to soothe a crying baby, which is taken up and cuddled by a Chinese-looking woman named Denise. Denise is no nanny, though. She breaks off cooing at the infant and yells, “Behave, Alex, or I swear to God!” at a gangling pickle-pus who must be her son, Billy’s great grandson.
Alex hastily puts down a flute of champagne, which is picked up and downed by his bald and miserable-looking 52-year-old counterpart.
“Old Alex must have learned he’s destined to have a heart attack,” whispers William. “Must be quite a shock.”
For her part, Mother has enthroned herself on a davenport at the other end of the living room. She has on old-fashioned evening gown, her hair poofed up around her head. Mucha could have found a better model for an illustration of The Sin of Pride, maybe, if he visited the court of Kubla Khan.
William identifies the women and girl standing around Mother as “the Cheryls,” before he bustles off to go kow-tow at the matriarchal shrine. Billy joins some other young kids in a game that seems to consist of clinging onto and being dragged around by the robotic legs of “Very Old Denise.”
I manage to snag food and booze without giving up my coat and try to figure out how to avoid trouble while I wait for William to come back and dump his revelations on me.
Mother might be a withered old stick in the mud, but she plays the hostess as if her life depends on it, and she flies in circles so lofty that we could run Chicago from our living room. Besides the music and caviar, we’ve got the the O’Hares, the Rathjes, and the Adlers. They all looking awful important with their diamond-studded tie pins and sequined evening gowns.
Or, they would look important, if the 1930s natives weren’t so spooked by the future people, who are wearing just about anything. And, in some cases, almost nothing. A glance tells me suits are destined to stay dull, while dresses will mutate wildly, turn into brightly-colored togas, dissolve into fuzzy, amorphous clouds, and finally sublimate into a force that simply makes it impossible to look at certain places on the wearer’s body. Wardrobe by hypnotic suggestion. I like the idea, but I guess it must get chilly.
I goggle at the future people so much that I don’t immediately notice that they’re all goggling back at me. Politely, of course. No more than a glance here and a comment there. Worse, Mother is watching me too, and her face, as William whispers in her ear, is dismal. That’s no big change for her, but when she looks me in the eyes, I see something terrifying: sorrow.
I take a step toward them, but Mother shakes her head. She jerks her chin toward the corner of the living room next to the punch bowl, where Rudolf is standing at the edge of a huddle of frightened 1930s celebrities.
“Ugh.” I mouth at her. “Rudolf?”
Mother jerks her head more forcefully.
I consider simply leaving. I still have all my money on me, but my mind goes to William and those dark hints he laid out in the car. What if he remembers something from when his sister ran away from home? What if something is fated to happen to me in the spring of 1930?
I find a full champagne flute and beard Rudolf by the punch bowl.
He tells me I look lovely again. Maybe he was expecting me to get ugly in the last half hour? I thank him, put a cucumber sandwich in my mouth, and try to chew slowly. This passes the time, and also helps to avoid gasping in surprise when Rudolf says, “I was thinking.”
“Mm?” I encourage.
“I was thinking of a trip to Denver,” Rudolf says. “There’s still snow there. We can ski.”
I might like to ski. I never have tried it. When I do, however, I believe I’ll take somebody else with me. I would rather not die of boredom on a mountain in Colorado.
Rudolf looks as if he might expect an answer.
“I’d rather drive than ski,” I tell him. “And I can do that right here in Chicago.”
“What about flying?” he asks. “Would you like to fly?”
This time I can’t help but gasp aloud, and Rudolf gives me a tiny smile. The minute upward hoisting to his toothbrush mustache might indicate that he knows that I would sell my left arm for the chance to fly an aircraft.
I test him. “Billy would want to come.”
Rudolf shakes his head. “It would be better with just the two of us. More romantic.”
More romantic, he says, the wet sock. But all I say is, “My mother won’t agree to it.”
“She already has. I spoke with her. We can leave tomorrow.”
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Where Rudolf is concerned, Mother stops pulling me back and sets to pushing me forward. And I can always enjoy that flight to Denver before shutting my hotel room door in Rudolf’s face. Besides which, I’ll have my taser with me.
I say yes, and we stare at each other for a few more minutes, while I imagine my hands on the steering yoke and the plane banking under me. Rudolf imagines God knows what.
“Hey,” someone says behind me, “hi!”
I turn and look down to see a little black girl in a bizarre outfit. It looks as if she’s taken some boys’ clothes and splashed bright-colored paint all over them. She holds out a hand, bold as you please.
“I’m Kisha,” she says. “Are you Ruth? I’m your un-un-great-granddaughter!”
“You’re my what?” I ask, but a noise from the door makes Kisha jump and puts hands over her mouth.
I follow the little girl’s gaze to the beautiful blonde who has just stalked through the door, and who now surveys us from the folds of her fur coat as if she’s auditioning for the role of Evil Queen in a Disney picture. I’m just considering about how much competition she’s got in this family when she looks me in the eye.
“You,” the Snow Queen mouths. Or maybe it’s, “No.” Her high cheekbones go livid and she crosses herself.
I take a step forward and she turns away. “No. I can’t do this.” She has the same accent as the little girl and the mug who sold me the taser. “Kisha,” she calls. “Come here.”
Kisha frowns at the blonde. “But mom – ”
“Now!” she this woman who I realize must be my granddaughter. “Jesus, these awful people. I should never have brought you here.”
“Ginevra,” William’s voice rises above the party noise. “What are you doing here? I told you to wait an hour.”
Ginevra? What kind of name is that, even? Billy was right about future people and their screwy ways.
“I didn’t trust you,” Ginevra says. “I was right not to. You haven’t told Ruth a thing, have you? Why is she still fucking here, William? Why are you over there talking to your fucking mother?”
William doesn’t get a chance to answer. “You there,” says Mother. “Who are you and what makes you think you can speak so to my family?”
Ginevra’s eyes jerk wide. Her upper lip curls.
Kisha runs to her mother. “I’m sorry,” says the little girl. “We can go. I’m sorry, mom. Please don’t be mad.”
Ginevra nods slowly. Still glaring at Mother, she turns her head to the left and spits deliberately onto a potted palm.
“What was that all about?” I ask once the ruckus has died down.
“Search me,” says Rudolf, uselessly.
But no, the ruckus still has some life in it. The blonde, Ginevra, strong-arms past a trio of tall black women who must be the old, very old, and very very old counterparts of Kisha. Mother in heaven, that kid will live a long time.
My three great-granddaughters march up to Mother, William, and the Cheryls. One of them says something I can’t hear. I do feel the temperature drop, though.
“I wonder,” I say as I watch chill spread from this witches’ row. “Why are all my descendants so mad?”
I’m not expecting an answer from Rudolf, but he gives me one anyhow. “None of them would come with me,” he says. “I met them at the airport. Betty and Ginevra and the Kishas. I told them I was to fetch them, but they wouldn’t come with me. They wouldn’t talk to me, even.”
I’m about to ask Rudolf if my descendants hated him as much as William did, but there’s the old bird himself, looking me straight in the eyes.

William is standing behind Mother, who is still arguing with the Kishas, and he isn’t just looking at me, he’s staring like I’m a ghost. So are two Kishas and a Cheryl. And I’ve had the same horrified fascination from almost everyone at this gathering of my future family. It’s as if they’re watching the beginning of a train wreck.
My earlier suspicions grow cold and solid. Something happens to me in the spring of 1930. Or somebody wants me to think so. My hand goes to my jacket pocket. “What the hell is this?” I mutter.
“Just what I’m wondering.” Rudolf’s eyebrows meet in the middle of his forehead. So that’s what worry looks like on him. “Everyone is awfully touchy, but nobody will tell me why.”
“Someone’ll tell me,” I say, and put down my champagne flute. “So long, Rudolf. See you at the airport.”
I meet William in the same place Billy and I used to go to get away from Mother’s parties. The closet under the stairs is empty of furniture now and tall enough for us both to stand comfortably.
“Quickly.” William is sweating, face red, eyes shifty. “They’ll miss me soon.”
“Oh, they will, will they?” I sneer. What sort of dumb cluck does he think I am that I haven’t caught on to his game yet? “Because Mother doesn’t want you talking to me? Isn’t that right, William?”
“She forbade me explicitly.”
“As if I should believe you. You think you can play me for a sucker? I know what goes on.”
“I very much doubt you do.” William wipes his brow. “Saints alive, I wasn’t this nervous when I was plotting to overthrow the United States government.”
That throws me. “You what?”
“Staged a revolution.” He tugs on the lapels of his uniform. “But that’s not important.” He leans closer. “Ruth, I have to tell you – ”
I hold up my hands. “Right. You’ve some dire horse feathers to sell me about how my future self ruined her life.”
“Horse feathers?” repeats William as if he doesn’t know the meaning of the phrase.
“Admit it,” I say. “You and Mother want me to believe all my plans will end in tears. So you arranged for this whole parade of descendants to come here and show me so.”
William shakes his head, blinking. “We haven’t arranged – ”
“And even if it weren’t a load of hooey, things will be different this time,” I assure him. “I’ve got a…well. Let’s just say I can protect myself now.”
“No, Ruth – ”
“Let me finish,” I say. “I’ve made my own plans, and unless you give me an awful good reason – ”
“Ruth!” William’s voice is choked. “Don’t get on that plane with Rudolf.”
“Rudolf?” I repeat dumbly. I thought he was about to forbid me to run away.
“Break off your engagement,” says William.
“Take it easy,” I tell him. “I’m not engaged. I’m not even thinking about marriage.”
William glances over his shoulder at the door to the closet. “Mother will be here any moment. Listen. What’s your relationship with Rudolf?”
“Relationship? That’s an odd way to put it.”
“Did he invite you to go on a plane ride to Denver?”
I move my shoulders. “Yeah?”
“Jesus.” He’s shaking. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, don’t go with him, Ruth. You’ll marry him, Ruth, and then you’ll – ” He breaks off, shakes his head, runs his hands across his face. “No. Not you. She. She committed suicide.”
I feel as if I’ve been kicked in the gut. “She who? Your sister, you mean? My counterpart?” That might explain her kids’ reaction when they saw me. Suicide. Jesus. “Why?”
William shakes his head again. “I don’t know why she killed herself.” Then, as if he knows all too well, “It was after the War, when Rudolf came back from the Pacific.”
“That’s that war with Japan, you mean,” I say. “But now there won’t be a war.”
“I don’t give a damn about any old war!” says William. “Rudolf is still going to…” He closes his eyes and shakes his head, the back of his trembling hand pressed to his mouth.
I’m out of patience. “You think Rudolf drove me – my counterpart, I mean – to suicide. Swell. Did she tell you how? Because that’s what I’d like to know.”
“She never told me,” admits William. “My sister and I drifted apart during the war and I saw her only once between 1945 and her death. That was for Betty’s christening in ’47.”
“Betty. My daughter,” I say. “I mean her daughter.” The one who wouldn’t come to this house and wouldn’t tell Rudolf why. Mother of Ginevra, who couldn’t bring herself to look at me, grandmother of Kisha, whose three counterparts who had descended like furies on Mother.
“Betty was her second daughter.” William levels a look at me like a melancholy cannon. “Ruth, your counterpart’s eldest daughter was born in 1930.”
That’s not a kick to the gut; it’s a pie in the face. “Go on with you. I’m not pregnant, for Christ’s sake.”
“Not yet,” William says.
“Not yet, he says.” I’m starting to heat up again. Someone is playing me, even if the game isn’t what I thought it was. “It’s already 1930 and I don’t intend becoming pregnant before, what, the end of the month?”
William’s expression makes me double-check my math. I think about that romantic plane ride. Could butter-sandwich Rudolf actually seduce me?
Could he do worse?
I take a sharp breath. “What are you telling me, William?” But I know what he’s telling me. The skin on my neck prickles and all of a sudden the closet seems awfully dark and close. The air is clogged with old horror.
“I suspect,” says William, voice as heavy as a tax audit, “that young Rudolf has gotten tired of waiting.”
He’ll to force me to marry him. That’s what William is saying. Nine months later, my first daughter will be born, and I’ll stay with Rudolf for her sake. Then, when Rudolf comes back from the war 18 years later, he’ll rape me again. I’ll have another daughter, and that’s when I’ll decide to take my own life.
“The Kishas were right, damn them,” mutters William, rubbing his chin as if he feels dirty. “You deserve to know this even if Mother – ”
“Mother doesn’t want me to know any of this.” I point a shaking finger at him. “You spilled this whole story to her just now. That’s what you came here to do in the first place. And that job you offered me in the Nuclear Commons – ”
“I was wrong to do so.”
“– it was to get me out of this house.”
William sighs miserably. “Your mother refused, in any case. But, Ruth, you can still – ” William touches my shoulder and I twist away.
“Get your hand off me.”
“I’m sorry. I felt I had to tell you.” He looks out the closet again. “But you can see I also had to tell Mother.”
My fingertips are tingling. I see for the first time that William is between me and the closet door.
“Mother,” he swallows. “Your mother, that is, she says the future safety and, and prosperity of the family are worth your marrying Rudolf.”
“Oh she does, does she?” I raise my voice. “Her safety is worth the sacrifice of my whole damn future?”
William wrings his hands and snivels, but it isn’t he who answers.
“What are you sacrificing, Ruth? Much less than I ever had to.”
Mother is at the closet door.
“Go to hell, you dirty, rotten harpy,” I tell her, since nothing better comes to mind.
She brushes off the insults like silverfish crawling in the lace at her breast. “Weren’t you listening, Ruth? We shall prevent your suicide.”
“Not the rape, though,” I say. “That, you’re attempting to ensure.”
“Don’t make her marry that man,” pleads William.
Mother rolls her eyes. “Of course she must marry him. The Bleirer family brings us through the Great Depression. You told me so yourself, William.”
“There won’t be a Great Depression now,” he says. “Not in your timeline.”
“That misses the point a good ways,” I say. “How about I find someone better to marry, my own damn self?”
“And whom would you choose?” Mother shakes her head. “It has become clear to me that women in our family are afflicted with the urge to marry the strangest men they can find.”
I think of my father. He lives on the other side of town and opposes everything mother does, but I wouldn’t call him “strange.”
William also looks perplexed. “Beg pardon?”
“Nothing,” says Mother. “Ruth, I have been too lenient – ”
I shout over whatever lecture she has prepared. “You’re about to sell my virtue for a share of the Chicago meat packing business, you hag.”
Mother’s lip curls. I’m reminded of Ginevra. “Keep your voice down, Ruth.”
“Selling my virtue,” I shout louder, “for the possibility of – ”
“For our family’s safety,” she hisses. “Yes. And you, Ruth, would make the same decision if you were in my position.”
“Oh I would, would I?”
Mother puts her hands together and presses her fingertips to her lips, eyes closed as if praying. “Once I was foolish like you,” she says in a calmer voice, “and two persons were killed.”
I’m back up in the air. Mother’s killed people?
“Mother?” asks William.
“No,” Mother opens her eyes and drops her hands. “There is no reason for you to repeat my mistakes in order to learn my lessons, Ruth. You can simply listen to me now. And as for Rudolf, I shall ensure his good behavior.”
Her voice makes William and me shiver. I almost feel sorry for that vile, lizard-eyed rapist. Although not sorry enough to spend another minute in his company.
“He will treat you as a gentleman should,” says Mother. “In all other ways, however, you two are to carry on as canonical history dictates.”
“As you dictate, you mean.” Why am I arguing with her? I could never change Mother’s mind about anything. Now I can’t bear even to stay in the same house as her. She can go to hell. This whole city go to hell. This whole damn era of history!
I reach into my pocket. “I won’t let Rudolf rape me, Mother.”
She winces. “Language, Ruth. Why did you tell her, William? For God’s sake, don’t let her past you.”
William makes helpless little circles with his hands, and I see that Mother doesn’t need a time machine to turn an old bird into a little kid. “But you don’t need the Bleiers,” he says. “You can all come live with me. Be reasonable!”
Mother barks out a laugh. “Live? In your half-baked pseudo-Marxist utopia? No. As always, I must stay behind and create safety while others dive into danger. I must stay the course.” She points at me, finger like the barrel of a manicured rifle. “And your course, young lady, is set.”
I pull the taser out of my coat. “I’m fixing to un-set it.”
Mother’s eyes focus on the weapon and her powdered forehead wrinkles. “What is that? Some sort of gun? Put it away, Ruth, before someone sees you with it.”
William slaps his forehead. “Gun? The gun! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! This is the spring of 1930! Ruth was planning to run away!”
“Run?” Mother’s glare twitches from me to William. “So stop her! She won’t shoot you.”
William reaches out for me. “My sister had a gun, but that thing looks like – ”
I stick the taser in William’s armpit and press that button.
There’s no spark this time, just a hideous chattering sound like the jaws of a giant insect. But I keep my hold on the weapon as William spasms away from me. Brandish it like a cross in Mother’s face. She’s smart enough to get out of the way, but not smart enough to start screaming until I’m out the front door.
Clouds pile up in the northern sky, but ahead, the air between me and Future Pier is clear and blue. I haven’t my hat or the love of my family, but I’ve got the taser, my money, and the key to the Landau, which is right where I parked it.
I tear open my car’s door as they pour out of the house after me. Elmos and Ignacios, Denises and Cheryls. The Kishas advance on me like a troop of Valkyries, but I press the starter button and roar away down the street.
I don’t have much time. Mother will turn this whole city into a machine for capturing me. Billy is probably crying. I might feel a bit lousy about William. I don’t suppose I’ll be able to take him up on his job offer now. Mostly what I am, though, is glad to be in a position where I can just give up on all these mugs and get out of town.
I grip the wheel so hard it hurts and take a left turn onto Lake Shore Drive. Hooked streetlights and young trees flash past, and Future Pier stretches off to the east. Tickets on the time trains come dear, but I’ve got this big, valuable car, haven’t I?
I pat the dashboard. “Time to trade you up, old boy,” I say, “for something that can fly.”

I remember I was out on a mission with my translator Plamen. We were way out in Aaha space, trying to sell a magnetic confinement fusion device as “human folk art.”
Here was the scam: you take this stellarator coil, which ought to work in theory, but has never managed to produce electricity economically. You sell the stellarator to an alien art collector, talking up its historical value as an example of the primitive handicraft of fusion power generation. Then it’s – whoops! something must have damaged the stellarator during delivery. So sorry! We’ll drop the price if you help us repair it. Then, we pay careful attention to the repairs, take our notes back to Earth, hand them to whoever we want to win the next Nobel Prize in physics, and Bob, as they say, is your uncle.
It didn’t work out that way. Of course, Plamen and I were given thorough check-ups before we left Earth, and of course we ate nothing but what came out of our Amazonian kitchen replicator. But I developed appendicitis, anyway.
I tried to muscle through it during meetings. I’d be doubled up in pain while male Aaha art students climbed over my back. They thought I was flirting with them! It wasn’t going to work.
Plamen said he had to do something. But what could he do? We were in a “nucleon arts college” tethered like a balloon to a neutron star made of negative matter, somewhere that isn’t even in Earth’s light cone. The Aahas had bought two-way ride vouchers for us with a return trip in three months, and a new one would cost more than the Earth (outside Amazonia) produced in a year. We were stuck, and medical facilities here would have no idea what to do with an appendix.
I still don’t know how Plamen found them. Some sort of alien social media? I shudder to think. All I remember is sweating on my cot while they poked at me. Aaha fingers, Beezle bugs, and some terrifying barbed thing that Plamen called a “gynosome.”
They weren’t doctors. There weren’t artists, either, exactly. And certainly not scientists. They asked me questions like “what is the diplomatic protocol for negotiations with your gut flora?” and “is cellulose a popular building material on Earth?” and “to the best of your memory, when was the last time your species engaged in folivory?”
I was given something to drink that tasted like electrolytes. “Calcium ions!” I heard one of them say as my vision went blurry. “Didn’t you do a project like that back in college?”
“Yes, but I never thought to combine it with hind-gut fermentation. What an idea! Symbiosis has been done to death of course, but making the mutualists prokaryotic is a good twist.”
When I regained consciousness, I had a headache and a potbelly, but the pain in my gut was gone.
When questioned, Plamen told me not to worry, the new tissue was all made in the kitchen replicator. When questioned again, more loudly, he said he was sorry. He’d been desperate. That’s why he’d delivered me up to a gang of speculative biologists.
“We can always get it removed,” he said, poking my large, new gut. “And in the mean time, you can eat all the leaves you want.”

Energy curdled back into mass as the ship translated out of light speed. After a pause for the crew to get used to experiencing time again, the ship’s instruments extended.
From the crew’s perspective, they’d finished an extensive survey of this part of space just a moment ago. For this part of space, however, 600 years had passed, so it was important to make sure nothing had changed.
Something had.
“It used to be a star like the sun,” explained the astrophysicist, whose name was Gaviria. “It had a family of planets ranging in size from a little larger than Earth to a little smaller than Neptune, all of them orbiting closer than the orbit of Jupiter.”
Marletta, the astrophysicist, spoke over Gaviria in his excitement. “So far, so similar to many other star systems. Really, it’s closer to the galaxy’s standard average than the Solar System.”
“Or it was when we translated to light,” said Gaviria.
“But?” asked Zhang.
Once a biochemist, Zhang had recently been elected to the post of “Social Coordinator,” or as he called himself, “cat herder.”
“Its planets have shrunk,” said Gaviria.
“Huh.” Zhang wondered why he was having this conversation. Aha. There it was. “You want me to authorize an away team.”
In free fall as he was, Marletta could not jump up and down with excitement. The best he could do was anchor himself to a hand-rail and vibrate in place. “It’s close. It’s super close!”
Zhang looked at Gaviria, who said, “Point nine eight light years.”
“Would a two-year-ship-time trip fit our flight plan?” Zhang’s question was directed at the ship’s computer, which cleared the mission. Soon, the three of them were packed and in their landing pod, which the ship translated into light. The team was away.
***
After either a year or no time at all, the landing pod re-materialized above a planet. Zhang, Marletta, and Gaviria watched the hazy, blue-white ball flicker in their portholes. As their pod translated itself into a safe landing trajectory, the planet vanished and reappeared, changing position and orientation. It grew closer.
Now, the planet filled all the portholes on one side of the pod. The diamond light of its home star limned its upper edge. Now, that light was tinged red by atmosphere, and the edge had become the horizon. The horizon developed mountains. Finally, the pod settled, the planet became the ground, and Gaviria, Marletta, and Zhang walked out onto it.
Zhang hopped experimentally, feeling his suit flex under the extra gee. He couldn’t smell anything except his own canned air, but his mics picked up the sound of running water, wind over rocks, and a distant bass pulse that might be surf.
They’d touched down on a hill overlooking a floodplain, where a river flowed into an ocean. The sun rose above the mountains on the other side of the plain, casting pink-yellow light onto clouds, folded rocks, and the forest growing out of the river.
The plants, if they were plants, had no leaves, branches or trunks. The green, blunt-nosed cones simply sat there, their roots – if they had roots – invisible under the water.
They might still prove to be some strange kind of geology, but Zhang allowed himself to take a leap of faith, and sighed, “Life.”
Part of the reason Zhang had accepted the post of cat herder was that there wasn’t usually much call for a biochemist. It wasn’t the first extraterrestrial biosphere that the Von Neumann Fleet had discovered, but it was a first for his individual ship.
“Samples samples aha,” Gaviria hummed to herself. She headed for a cone-plant growing in a nearby stream.
Marletta looked out over the blue ocean and green floodplain. “Life how? Six hundred years ago, this place was a sub-Neptune.”
“It’s much closer to its star than our Neptune,” said Zhang. “Right?”
Marletta flapped his hands. “And with a denser core. And not as close as Earth…really, it was intermediate between Earth and Neptune.”
“Which is unusual?”
“Well, yes. Usually you either have a terrestrial planet like Earth: a secondary atmosphere out-gassed from the rock.” Marletta held his hands apart, as if measuring a grapefruit. “Or,” He spread his hands out to the diameter of a beach ball.  “Or, you get a gas giant like Neptune, with an envelope of hydrogen and helium gathered out of the primordial matter that built its star. Those light gasses spread out farther, so the planet looks bigger from space.” He moved his palms inward, the volume between them now the size of basketball. “But then over time, heat from the planet and the star would have blown that primordial atmosphere away. That’s why we assumed that the intermediate diameters, like the one-point-five Earth diameter this planet used to have, were so rare.”
“Rarer now!” said Gaviria. She chipped away at the green cone-plant with her multi-tool. The surface of the organism was as hard as the heat shielding of their landing pod. “Since we left Earth, every planet in this system has shrunk down.”
Zhang watched Gaviria work. “And in only six hundred years,” he mused. “I’m assuming that’s much faster than any stellar or geological process could account for.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” said Gaviria.
But Zhang didn’t have to line up his evidence for a review board. He was a cat herder now, and he could jump to whatever he wanted. “Marletta, did the observations we made from Earth indicate oxygen in this planet’s atmosphere?”
“Well, we don’t know,” said Marletta. “We never recorded any absorption spectra through the original atmosphere. All we have are the transit and radial velocity data that told us the size and mass of this system’s planets. But…” His brain caught up with his mouth.
On Earth, Marletta would have spun around to face Gaviria and her cone-plant. In two gees, he wobbled like a penguin, but eventually got himself turned in the right direction. “You mean photosynthesis?”
“How much longer?” Zhang asked Gaviria. His logic was leading him into uncomfortable places.
Gaviria gave her cone-plant another whack with her multitool, which didn’t even scratch the surface. “Just let me get my sample. It’s not going to go off right now, just because we’re talking about it.”
“‘Go off,'” Zhang repeated.
Marletta thought out loud. “Water and carbon dioxide go in, oxygen and carbohydrates come out. O2 gas rises to mix with the H2, and now every time there’s a bolt of lightning or other spark…”
“Well,” said Gaviria, “boom.”
Marletta swore in English, and Zhang made a decision.
“We need to go.”
“Stop being paranoid, this all happened hundreds of years ago.” Gaviria scratched at the cone again.
Marletta stopped, his colleague’s assumptions overriding his sense of self-preservation. “Wait. That’s still not fast enough. The entire atmosphere couldn’t have, uh, explosively oxidized in only six hundred years.”
Zhang answered the implied question. “There must have been biological processes actively speeding things up. Sequestrating the hydrogen? Controlling the rate of reaction?” He shook his head, remembering he was supposed to be herding these cats. “Let’s go, Gaviria. We can print out better tools on the pod.” After a light-speed jump into deep space, he added silently.
“I suppose so,” Gaviria reluctantly put away her multitool and hoisted herself out of the stream.
Marletta couldn’t snap his fingers in his suit, but he tried. “And it didn’t just happen on this planet, did it? Every planet in the system lost its hydrogen atmosphere within the same six-hundred-year window!”
“Panspermia!” crowed Gaviria from the bank.
Zhang groaned because he had always hated the idea of panspermia. Also, because steam was rising from the cone-plant behind his geologist.
***
It was a good thing, they decided later, that Gaviria hadn’t been able to crack the ablative shielding on the cone-plant. If she had, it could well have exploded.
As it was, though, the plant only launched.
Back in the safety of their pod, the three humans watched as the green, ceramic-shelled organism lifted into the sky on its pillar of fire, and began its mission to spread life to other stars.




This story was inspired by William Misener’s “To Cool is to Keep: Residual H/He Atmospheres of Super-Earths and sub-Neptunes.” Thanks go out to him and everyone at the 2020 NASA Exoplanet Science Institutes Exoplanet Demographics conference.
This story was published in “Heavy Metal Jupiters,” the zine of the Exoplanet Demographics 2020 conference.

This Thirty Years Plus story is inspired by Joanne Rixon’s op-ed in the Tacoma News Tribune. I encourage you to write your own.

The year is 2050 and a storm washes Sloveykov Square. Rain curtains hide buildings of concrete, glass, and transverse laminated timber. Also invisible is the apartment of Yulia Raymundo Smirnova.
From the metro station “St. st. Cyril and Methodius” – still sunny – Yulia watches the lightning right above her home and considers her next move.
Some people raise umbrellas or wave at ground taxis. Others descend back into the underpass or change their jackets into temporary shelters to await the resumption of flying services. The inflated tents of smart material much resemble those of the protestors in front of the National Assembly. They want the right for single-family homes to be built within the municipality of Sofia. In Yulia’s opinion, they won’t get it. That’s why she’s wondering whether to move to the countryside.
And why not? Yulia thinks while her feet carry her down into the underpass. Her husband already works from home, and many children attend online schools. Isn’t a private garden nicer than a municipal one? That’s the opinion of most of Yulia’s friends.
By habit she buys a newspaper, which she pays for with a tap of her wooden bank card. Her parents still use their smartphones for paying, reading, and everything else, but younger people want one gadget for one task. And even better if it’s made of bio materials.
Invisible circuits in the clothes of Yulia and the salesman record the transaction and she climbs the stairs to Knyazheska Garden. Around it sigh the electric and hydrogen cars of the great carbon-neutral traffic jam of the mid-21st century.
Expensive private cars get in the way of trolleys and cargo vans, but the driverless vehicles do not honk their horns. The cyclists are much louder. They don’t give a damn what’s pouring from the heavens – neither rain nor snow. They would ride merrily shouting through a rain of flaming tar, at least according to them.
The sycamores tremble over Levski street. The drones and swifts return to their nests under eaves and old solar panels. The monsoon continues as Yulia reads of Kaliningrad and the price of Arabian ammonia. Biomass energy with or without carbon dioxide capture? This month, the American scandal is “Neuralgate.” Taxes on parking in Sofia and subsidies for home hydrogen batteries will rise.
All of this changes the weather, but not all at once.
The first drops of today’s storm fall on the newspaper, which begins to transform into biodegradable mulch. Yulia lets it run between her fingers, to where it will nourish tomorrow’s grass.
Yulia stands. She will go home on foot. If she walks slowly, the rain might stop. Or else she might just get more wet. Well, alright. She’s realized that she loves to walk through her city in the rain.
__
Годината е 2050 и буря мие Площад Словейков. Дъждените завеси крият сгради на бетон, стъкло, и напречен ламиниран дървен материал. Също невидим е апартамента на Юлия Раймундо Смирнова.
От метростанция “Св. св. Кирил и Методий” – още слънчевна – Юлия гледа светкавицата чак над дома й и счита за следващия си ход.
Едни хора вдигат чадари или махат към земните таксита. Други спускат се пак в подлеса или сменят якетата си в временните приюти за да чакат възобновяването на летящите услуги. Надуваемите палатки на умна материя много приличат тези от протестиращите пред народното събрание. Те искат правото да се стройят еднофамилни къщи в общината в София. Според Юлия няма да го спечелят. За това се чуди тя дали да се премести в провинцията.
И защо не? Юлиа мисли докато краката си я носят долу в подлеса. Мъжът й вече работи от вкъщи, и много деца посещават онлайн училищета. Собствената градина не ли е по-хубаво от обществената? Така е мнението на повече от приятели на Юлия.
По навик тя купи вестник, за който плати с едно потупване от дървената й банковна карта. Нейните родители ощте изполвате смартофоните си за плащане, четене, и всичко друго, но по-млади хора искат едно джадже за една задача. И все по-добре е то ако е направено от био материали.
Невидими схеми в дрехите на Юлия и продавача запишете продажбата и тя качва стълбите към Княжеска Градина. Около я се въздишат електрическите и водородните автомобили на якото въглерод-неутрално задръстване на средно-21ия век.
Скупи лични коли пречат тролеи и товарни микробуси, но безшофюрните превозни средства не бибипкат клаксони. Много по шумни са велосипедистите. Не тях пука какво полее от небесата – нито дъжд, нито сняг. Би карали весело викайки през един дъжд на пламтящ катран, поне според тях.
Чинарите треперят над ул. Левски. Дроновете и бързолетите тръгват в гнездите си под стрехи и стари слънчеви панели. Мусонът продължи като Юлия чете за Калининград и цената на арабски амоняк. Биомасна енергиа със или без съхранението на въглероден диоксид? Този месец, американският скандал е “Неврогейт.” Данъци за паркинг в София и субсидии за домашни водародни акумулатори ще се вдигнат.
Всички от това променява времето, но не все веднага.
Първите капки на днешнията бурия падне на вестника, който започне да се трансформира в биоразрадим мулч. Юлия дава му да изтече между пръстите й, към където той ще подхранва утрешната тревата.
Юлия застава. Ще тръгва са на пеша. Ако ходи бавно, дъждът може да се спре. Иначе може само тя да стана по-мокра. Ей добре. Осъзнала е че обича да разхожда из града си под дъжда.