Sea of Tranquility(31)

“Where did the glamour go?” I asked. She’d poured me a generous glass of whiskey, which I was sipping very slowly because I’ve never had much of an alcohol tolerance. She was already on her second drink.

“To the newer colonies, I suppose. Titan, I guess. Europa. The Far Colonies.” We were at her kitchen table. She lived across the street from the Time Institute, which I’d known intellectually without fully absorbing. What did Zoey have? She’d been very close with our mother, and now that Mom was gone, what Zoey had was her work. Her work and almost nothing else, to all appearances, but who was I to judge. I leaned back in my chair, gazing over the Time Institute rooftops at the luminescent spires of beyond. Could I immigrate to the Far Colonies? Fantastical thought. But of course the thought that followed was If we’re living in a simulation, it’s not like the Far Colonies are real either.

“What happened to them?” I asked. “The letter writer back in the twentieth century, Edwin whatever his name was, and Olive Llewellyn?”

Zoey had somehow finished her second glass—I was still only halfway through my first—and poured herself a third.

“The letter writer went to war, returned home to England a broken man, and died in an insane asylum. Olive Llewellyn died on Earth. A pandemic broke out while she was on a book tour.”

“Zoey,” I said, “has your investigation started yet?”

“Sort of. Preliminary discussions are under way. The bureaucracy around travel is intense.”

“Will you get to…Will you be the one to travel?”

“I almost left the Time Institute a few years ago,” she said. “I agreed to stay on condition that I never have to travel again.”

“You’ve traveled through time,” I said, and my awe at my sister was boundless in that moment. “Where did you go?”

“I can’t talk about it.” Her expression was grim.

“Can you at least tell me why you don’t want to do it anymore? I’d think it’d be…”

“You’d think it’d be interesting,” she said. “It is. At first it’s fascinating. It’s a portal to a different world.”

“Right, that’s how I imagined it.”

“But before you go, Gaspery, you might spend two years engaged in research. When you’re going to a given point in time, you’re there to investigate some specific thing, and you read up on everyone you expect to encounter. There are people at the Time Institute, hundreds of staff, whose entire job is researching long-dead people to compile dossiers for travelers, and your job is to study those dossiers until you know everything in them.” She stopped to drink. “So, Gaspery, picture this scene. You step into a party, at some long-ago point in time, and you know exactly how and when each and every person in that room is going to die.”

“That’s pretty creepy,” I admitted.

“And some of them are going to die in the most preventable ways, Gaspery. You might be talking to a woman, let’s say she has young children, and you know she’s going to drown at a picnic next Tuesday, and because you can’t mess with the time line, the one thing you absolutely cannot say to her is ‘Don’t go swimming next week.’ You have to let her die.”

“You can’t pull her from the water.”

“Right.”

For a while I wasn’t sure what to say, so I gazed out the window at the rooftops and spires and wondered if letting someone die for the sake of the time line was something I could do. Zoey drank quietly.

“The job requires an almost inhuman level of detachment,” she said finally. “Did I say almost? Not almost inhuman, actually inhuman.”

“So someone will have to travel through time to investigate this,” I said, “but it won’t be you.”

“It will be several people, but I don’t know who. It’s not exactly a popular job.”

“Send me,” I said. Because what I was thinking in that moment was that the theoretical woman who was going to drown next Tuesday was going to drown anyway.

She looked at me, surprised. Two spots of pink had appeared on her cheeks, but otherwise she seemed perfectly sober.

“Absolutely not.”

“Why not?”

“One, it’s a horrifically dangerous job. Two, you’re not qualified.”

“What kind of background would you have to have, to travel back in time and talk to people? That’s what it is, isn’t it? I mean, what are the qualifications?”

“There’s a barrage of psychological testing, followed by years of training.”

“I could do that,” I said. “I could go back to school, I could do whatever training was required. You know I almost finished my criminology degree. I know how to conduct an interview.”

She was quiet.

“You want to keep the circle small here,” I said, “don’t you? Imagine the panic if word got out that we’re living in a simulation.”

“We don’t know that we’re living in a simulation, and I don’t know that panic is quite the word. More like terminal ennui.”

I decided to look up ennui later. There are words you encounter all your life without knowing what they mean.

“Zoey,” I said, “I’m not doing anything with my life.”