4
—and we were in a different room, in a different place.
I was lying on my back on a wood floor, in a bedroom, in what seemed to me to be an old-fashioned kind of house. My arm was bleeding; I held it reflexively to my chest. Sunlight poured in through a window. I sat up. There was wallpaper with roses, wooden furniture, and through a doorway I saw a room with a shower and a toilet.
“What is this place?”
“This is a farm on the outskirts of Oklahoma City,” she said. “I’ve paid a great deal of money to the owners, and you can stay here indefinitely, as a boarder. The year is 2172.”
“2172,” I said. “So in twenty-three years, I’ll visit Oklahoma City to interview the violinist.”
“Yes.”
“How are you here? Surely the Time Institute didn’t approve this trip.”
“I was arrested that day,” she said. “The day you were sent to Ohio. I had tenure and an otherwise sterling record, so I wasn’t lost in time, but I spent a year in prison and then immigrated to the Far Colonies. The Time Institute thinks they have the only functional time machine in existence. They don’t.”
“There’s a time machine in the Far Colonies? And you just, what, get to use it?”
“I’m employed by…another organization there,” she said.
“Even with your record?”
“Gaspery,” she said, “no one’s better than me at what I do.” She spoke matter-of-factly; she wasn’t boasting.
“You know, I still don’t know what that is.”
She ignored this. “I made this mission a condition of my agreeing to take the job in the Far Colonies,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner. I mean to an earlier point in time.”
“It’s okay. I mean, thank you. Thank you for coming for me.”
“I think it’s safe here, Gaspery. I built a paper trail for you. You should settle in. Meet the neighbors.”
“Zoey, I can’t thank you enough.”
“You’d do the same for me.” (Unspoken between us: I couldn’t do the same for her. She was of a different order from me, and always had been.) “I don’t know if we’ll see each other again,” Zoey said.
Had we ever hugged before? I couldn’t remember. She clasped me close for just a moment, stepped back, and was gone.
I was alone in the room, but alone wasn’t a strong enough word for it. I knew no one in this century, and the fact of having been through this before did nothing to assuage my loneliness. I had a deranged moment of wondering how Hazelton was doing, then remembered that my cellmate would have died of old age by now.
I went to the window, in a daze, and looked out at a sea of green. The farm reached almost to the horizon, field upon field with agricultural robots moving slowly in the sunlight. In the far distance, I saw the spires of Oklahoma City. The sky was a dazzling blue.