9
The training wasn’t like immersing myself in a different world. It was like immersing myself in successive different worlds, these moments that had arisen one after another after another, worlds fading out so gradually that their loss was apparent only in retrospect. Years of private instruction in small rooms in the Institute, years of passing by people who may or may not have been my fellow students in the halls—no one wore name tags here—and years of studying quietly in the Time Institute library, or in my apartment late at night with my cat asleep on my lap. Five years after I left the hotel, I reported for the first time to the travel chamber.
It was a midsize room made entirely of some kind of composite stone. At one end was a bench, molded into a deep indentation in the wall. The bench faced an extremely ordinary-looking desk. Zoey was waiting there, with a device that looked unnervingly like a gun.
“I’m going to shoot a tracker into your arm,” she said.
“Good morning, Zoey. I’m fine, thanks for asking. Nice to see you too.”
“It’s a microcomputer. It interacts with your device, which interacts with the machine.”
“Okay,” I said, giving up on pleasantries. “So the tracker sends information to my device?”
“Remember that time I gave you a cat?” she said.
“Of course. Marvin. He’s napping at home as we speak.”
“We sent an agent back to another century,” Zoey said, “but the agent fell in love with someone and didn’t want to come home, so she removed her own tracker, fed it to a cat, and then when we tried to forcibly return her to the present, the cat appeared in the travel chamber instead of her.”
“Wait,” I said, “my cat’s from another century?”
“Your cat’s from 1985,” she said.
“What,” I said, at a loss for words.
She took my hand—when was the last time we’d touched one another?—and I observed her grim concentration as she shot a silver pellet into my left arm. It hurt much more than I would’ve imagined. She opened a projection over the desk, and turned her attention to the floating screen.
“You should have told me,” I said. “You should have told me my cat was a time traveler.”
“Honestly, Gaspery, what difference would it make. A cat’s a cat.”
“You never were an animal person, were you.”
Her mouth was set in a thin line. She wouldn’t look at me.
“You should be happy for me,” I said, while she was adjusting something in her projection. “This is the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do, and I’m doing it.”
“Oh, Gaspery,” she said absently. “My poor little lamb. Device?”
“Here.”
She took my device, held it close to the projection, and handed it back to me.
“Okay,” she said. “Your first destination has been programmed. Go sit in the machine.”
