Chronica Read online

  ***

  Max left to make sure Sierra's apartment from 2042 was still available for them – Sierra had purchased the apartment at some point for a tidy sum she had acquired in the future further along the line, but you never knew when it came to apartments in New York City. Max was also instructed to buy some decent 2062 clothing for the two of them. Sierra knew that he knew what she liked.

  Sierra wanted to relax in the hotel atrium with her phone. She could soak in some of what was new in 2062 ambience and do more research online into this new world she had unintentionally helped to create.

  She discovered something about two hours later, about five minutes before Max returned. He approached her with two bags filled with clothing and his patented big smile.

  "Ted Kennedy died on the day of Biden's first inauguration in 2009 in this reality," was her greeting to Max.

  He sat next to her on the neo-wicker seat, designed to automatically hug the right parts of your body, as the digi-sign said. "Didn't he die around then in our reality?" Max asked.

  "Yeah, but not on Obama's first inauguration day – Teddy survived until the following summer."

  Max nodded.

  "My grandmother was a big fan of the Kennedys," Sierra continued. "That was one of the reasons my mother chose Harvard over Princeton when she got her professorship in mathematics."

  "Ok," Max said, "so–"

  "Well, there's something even more interesting about this," Sierra said. "Ted Kennedy had some problem at the luncheon after Obama's inauguration and he was whisked away in an ambulance, and wrongly reported dead on Wikipedia."

  "I don't recall that," Max said.

  "You wouldn't," Sierra said. "But it was a big deal in our family. My grandmother always used to cite it as a reason you couldn't trust Wikipedia, even though Teddy's death then was also wrongly reported in other media."

  "Yeah, took a decade or two for Wikipedia to achieve its vaunted status, I know that," Max said.

  "The incorrect report of Ted Kennedy's death was a big deal in Wikipedia's history," Sierra continued. "I read about it in more than one text about the history of social media."

  Now Max grew very thoughtful. "I'm beginning to see why you think this incident is so important to what's now going on with us and our travels."

  "Exactly," Sierra said. "It's one thing that Aristotle's book changed history and got Biden elected President in 2008. That's earthshaking, as we've been saying. And the change in the date of Ted Kennedy's death is obviously important, too. But, what I'm wondering is why our reality, before we rescued the texts from Alexandria, had the wrong report of his death in January 2009 – why have any incident happening on that day at all?"

  "It's almost as if, for some reason, part of the current reality leaked into our original reality," Max said.

  Sierra nodded. "And does that suggest to you that maybe our current reality has some sort of priority or legitimacy when it comes to the date that Ted Kennedy died?"

  "You mean the reality we're now in – Biden President, Ted Kennedy dying on Biden's first inauguration day, Obama elected President in 2020 not 2008 – is somehow the reality that was most meant to be?"

  "Yeah, maybe," Sierra replied. "Though I'm not even clear about what exactly that means."

  "Well, one thing is pretty clear," Max said. "There's not all that much difference between the two realities, if you look at them a certain way. I mean, Biden was Obama's Vice President, and Ted Kennedy did die in the first year of Obama's first term, in our original reality. Whatever exactly that may mean."

  ***

  Sierra's apartment on 11th Street between 5th Avenue and University Place was fine. Automatic air systems had kept the rooms as fresh for 20 years as if the windows had been open the entire time on an early Spring day. And the neighborhood hadn't changed at all. "This is the first time we've been in this place together since that morning we flew to London, just a few days after you came over here that night in 2042. I had just begun reading the Andros dialogue," Sierra said, with a tingle of a tear in her eye.

  Max smiled deeply. "And we had a very good time that night, if memory serves."

  Sierra took his hand. "Seems like another lifetime, doesn't it?"

  "Life may be like that, anyway," Max said. "People often say that when they meet someone they hadn't seen since college, and that has nothing to do with time travel."

  Sierra nodded.

  "What I find even more amazing than how fresh this apartment smells is how the financial system worked so well for us," Max said, "almost as if the banking system was designed to accommodate time travelers." He laughed.

  "I guess people leave money in accounts, unattended, with nothing taken out or put in, all the time," Sierra said. "They passed some law in the 2020s about that, extending into perpetuity the time you could leave money in an account with no activity, just earning whatever interest. My parents were very happy about that, for some reason."

  Max resisted saying maybe your parents knew you would go into time travel. He confined himself to saying, "Do you want to go see them?"

  "I'm not sure," Sierra said. "They're both still alive and together – and content, as far as I know – but I don't know if I want to draw them into this."

  "And attract Heron to them," Max added. "Yeah, I get it. You should think about it."

  Max had been orphaned in 2040, a year before she and he had met, Sierra knew, so whether or not to meet his parents now in 2062 was moot. But there was always the option of trying to stop the train crash that took their lives, or getting them off the train, which would be easy, if she and Max decided to do that and went back to 2040. They had briefly talked about that in one of the rare quiet moments they had stolen in their run from Heron.

  "I know what you're thinking," Max said. "You're thinking about my parents, and wondering if the Biden Presidency starting in 2008 and the big boost it gave to train travel didn't result in a safer train system, meaning the crash that took my parents didn't happen in this reality."

  Sierra looked at him. Actually, that last part hadn't occurred to her at all.

  ***

  They took a robo-cab back up to the Millennium Club. They hadn't been able to look at the library's classical holdings when they'd arrived the previous day, because the area had been undergoing a renovation yesterday. They wanted to see which of the texts they had rescued in addition to Aristotle's treatise on good governance had made it into this future.

  Max had searched for his parents online. There indeed had been no train crash as in their original reality, but his mother had died anyway about five years later in a freak car accident in which a robotic automobile had gone awry. "One in a million," The New York Times story said, but it taught Max and Sierra something about the inevitability of death across time-lines – "at least fifty-percent of the time, that we now know of," Max had said, in a husky voice filled with shock, dread, anticipation, and other emotions Sierra could not identify. Max's father was now in Los Angeles, and Max had decided he'd wait at least a few hours to contact him, perhaps by phone, perhaps by flying out there to see his father in person.

  Sierra stroked Max's hand in the cab. She understood some of what he was going through, because she had gone through the same unnerving blender of emotion when first she lost him in Londinium in 150 AD and then discovered he hadn't died after all. She tried so hard not to provoke paradox in her journeys, and yet Max was going through the whiplash of its loops right now. But he was right in what he had said to her last night – what did she expect, given their tampering with history by rescuing the scrolls in Alexandria?

  The Millennium Club looked good in the noontime sunlight. It had basically remained unchanged in outward appearance since its construction at the end of the 1870s, a beacon of bygone Victorian culture in the neo-digital age. The doorman greeted them warmly with a British accent but didn't know them. Fortunately, both of their retinas were in the Millennium's databank.

  "Looks like a younger version
of Hudson from Downton Abbey," Max said about the doorman to Sierra, as the two walked up the stairs to the classics library.

  "Carson," Sierra said, "from Downton Abbey. Hudson's Upstairs, Downstairs."

  The classics library was now restored from yesterday's work and open to everyone in the club. It had all four of the Aristotle scrolls Sierra and Max had rescued, now translated by Benjamin Jowett and bound in the early 20th century green covers with gold embossing that Sierra had always loved. It had the Andros dialogue, right between the Phaedrus and Cratylus, in the four-volume Dialogues of Plato, also translated by Jowett. It had all the books known to have been written by Heron – his Automata, Belopoeica, Dioptra, Catoptrica, Geodesia, Geoponica, Mechanica, Metrica, and Pneumatica – and two thought to have been written by him, Geometria and Stereometrica. But there was no sign anywhere of Heron's Chronica.

  There was no sign of Mr. Charles or anyone else they knew, either.

  Sierra and Max took the four Aristotle books they had stolen from the ancient flames to a pitted maple table illuminated by a green banker's lamp that Sierra was sure was an original. "They used these in the early days of incandescent lighting to lessen the glare," Sierra said, "but they're beautiful in any case, aren't they?"

  Max nodded, distracted.

  "What's the matter?" Sierra asked him.

  Max took a deep breath. "I think I'll call my father now," he said, "the tension is killing me."

  "Of course," Sierra said tenderly and took his hand. "There's a men's room around that corner," she pointed to the far side of the room, "if you want some privacy. Or, we can leave these books for later, and we can go back to the apartment."

  "No," Max said. "You should look at the books." He kissed her on the forehead and walked quickly away.

  Sierra watched him and fought to keep her emotions in check. She carefully picked up Aristotle's treatise on good government. This edition had been published in 1933, the very year that what was left of Appleton's had merged with the Century Company to make the Appleton-Century Company. The first edition had been published by William Henry Appleton in 1898. That made sense – three years after she and Max had left the scrolls with him in his Wave Hill home, and a year before their beloved friend and protector was to die. Sierra turned the page and caught her breath. Here was something that made no sense at all.

  The translator was Benjamin Jowett, who Sierra was sure had died prior to Max's and her visit with Appleton in 1895. She surreptitiously checked Jowett's bio on her phone – mobile devices were forever not allowed in the Millennium – and yeah, she had been right, Jowett had died in 1893. His last work had been a translation of Aristotle's Politics, so translating another four treatises by the philosopher fit right in, but how on Earth did Appleton get the manuscripts from 1895 to Jowett before he died in 1893?

  Sierra shook her head and smiled. The answer should have been all too obvious to her. Appleton had assured her that he was going to retire from time traveling, and spend his last few years shuttling only between his home in the Bronx and his office on Bond Street in Manhattan, but of course he had changed his mind, traveled to London after she and Max had left in 1895, and taken a Chair back to 1890 or thereabouts to see Jowett–

  She became aware that Max was standing next to her. There was something not right, judging by the expression and paleness of his face, but she couldn't tell just what that was.

  "I spoke to my father," Max began.

  Sierra stood, and got Max into a chair.

  "It was a very short conversation," Max continued. "I couldn't say much, after he told me that he had just talked to me yesterday. I didn't want to disrupt his life or whatever the hell is going on in this reality, so I told him I was calling because I needed to check my recollection of something that happened when I was kid. I told him it was for an article I was writing."

  "Ok," Sierra said, and put her hand gently on Max's shoulder. "And . . . what did he tell you about your other life here?"

  "You and I are happily married and have two kids," Max said, with tears in his eyes and voice.

  ***

  They held each other's hands for a long time, and said nothing.

  "Are they an alternate version of us," Max finally said. "Or–"

  "They could be actually us, you and me, the human beings sitting right here now at this table, just a little or whatever into our future, and we traveled back to be with your father and got married," Sierra said slowly. "I don't know . . . we need more information from your father."

  "What do you think we should do?" Max said. "My father's in California, but I didn't ask him where our alternate Biden-as-2008-President selves may be – we could be right here in New York."

  "And we don't want to bump into ourselves and the paradoxes that could hurl in our faces," Sierra completed the thought.

  Max nodded. "We could travel to the future – a hundred or even two hundred years from now, to avoid running into ourselves with extended lifespans – or back into the past again."

  "Or we could travel to another place right now – like London," Sierra said.

  "The future sounds like a little more fun," Max said, with not much of a smile on his face.

  Chapter 2

  [Rome, 1615 AD]

  Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmine – consultor of the Holy Office, head of the Roman College, Cardinal, former Archbishop of Capua – turned to his guest with a weary smile. "So, Maffeo, any words of wisdom about Galileo? He'll be in Rome next week, and we have arranged a visit."

  Maffeo Barberini, scion of one of the wealthiest, most powerful families in Italy, a Cardinal, too – and one day to be Pope, Bellarmine was sure – removed a grape pit from his tongue. "Only what you already know – he is right."

  "Pity more of our people cannot grasp that," Bellarmine said. "The nonsense that has been produced in our own College – that the moon is really pure, perfect, sublimely spherical as Aristotle held, and the mountains and craters seen through Galileo's telescope are but imperfections far below that heavenly invisible surface – you would think this was 615 not 1615 of our Lord, and Rome had just been sacked of all common sense and reason!"

  Barberini chuckled. "As I recall, Galileo had a good answer to that feeble argument: if we accept that heavenly surfaces are invisible, then we could just as easily agree that the real surface of the moon, constructed of that same magical substance, actually rises in towering mountains ten times higher than his telescope has seen."

  "He is clever," Bellarmine said, unsmiling. "And that is what makes him dangerous. I have tried to convey to him the thought that his mathematics, his observations, may be right – that we may welcome them, rejoice in them, as an improvement over Ptolemy's epicycles – but that the underlying, everlasting truth is just as it ever was."

  "And what truth is that?" Barberini asked.

  "That is no doubt the question that troubles Galileo," Bellarmine replied, "and why he sometimes gives the appearance of accepting our arguments, yet in his truest soul rejects them. He knows that we ourselves are unsure of just what the underlying, everlasting truth really is."

  "As we have good reason to be," Barberini said. "But that is our burden – not the world's. And part of our burden is to keep the world – not only the physical world, but the souls of its people – stable."

  "Which brings us back to the problem of Galileo," Bellarmine said, sadly. "His theories, his publications, presented to the world without our mediation, cannot help but sow confusion in the common soul."

  "Have you implied to him anything at all of the Instruments?" Barberini asked, as delicately as he could manage.

  "No, I have not. Therein lies the road that was taken with Giordano Bruno. And it did no good – it did worse than no good. In the end . . ." Bellarmine could not bring himself to finish.