Sea of Tranquility(35)

“Oh, it is, Gaspery, but I like you and also I’ve developed a reckless streak in my old age, so I’m going to tell you anyway.” (She was, what, thirty-five? In that moment, I found her thrillingly jaded.) “Here’s the metric: they only go back and undo the damage if the damage affects the Time Institute. What am I, Gaspery? How would you describe me?”

This felt like a trap. “I…”

“It’s okay,” she said, “you can say it. I’m a bureaucrat. HR is bureaucracy.”

“Okay.”

“As is the Time Institute. The premier research university on the moon, possessor of the only working time machine in existence, intimately enmeshed in government and in law enforcement. Even one of those things would imply a formidable bureaucracy, don’t you think? What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.” She was gazing across the river again. “We lived on the third floor,” she said, pointing. “The balcony with the vines and rosebushes.”

“It’s nice,” I said.

“Isn’t it? Look, I understand why you’d want to work with the Time Institute,” she said. “It must seem like an exciting opportunity. It’s not like you’ve got much of a career path at the hotel. But just know that when the Institute is done with you, they’ll throw you away.” She spoke so casually that I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her correctly. “I have a meeting,” she said. “You should probably start your shift in the next hour or so.” She turned and left me there.

I looked back at the apartment building. I’d been to one of those apartments once, years ago, for a party, and I’d been fairly drunk at the time, but I remembered vaulted ceilings and spacious rooms. What I was thinking was that if anything went wrong with the Time Institute, I would never be able to say I hadn’t been warned.

But I felt such impatience with my life. I turned back to the hotel, and found that I couldn’t go in. The hotel was the past. I wanted the future. I called Ephrem.

“Could I start early?” I asked. “I know the plan was to give the hotel two weeks’ notice, but could I just start the training now? Tonight?”

“Sure,” he said. “Could you be here in an hour?”





8


“Would you like some tea?” Ephrem asked.

“Please.”

He typed something into his device, and we sat together at the meeting table. A sudden memory: drinking chai tea with Ephrem and Ephrem’s mother after school one day at Ephrem’s apartment, which was nicer than mine. Ephrem’s mother had a job she could do from home, I remembered; she’d been staring at a screen. Ephrem and I were both studying, so it must have been just before an exam, during a period when I’d been experimenting with (a) tea and (b) being a good student. I was about to bring up this moment—Do you remember?—when there was a soft chime at the door, and a young man came in with a tray, which he left on the table with a nod. Chai tea is real, I told myself, and then I realized: Ephrem must remember that long-ago moment too, because he’d only ever served me chai when I’d come here.

“Here you are.” Ephrem passed me a steaming mug.

“Why didn’t Zoey want me to work here?”

He sighed. “She had a bad experience a few years back. I don’t know the details.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Yes, I do. Look, this is just a rumor, but I heard she was in love with a traveler, then the traveler went rogue and got lost in time. That’s literally all I know.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Literally all I know that isn’t classified,” Ephrem said.

“How do you get lost in time?”

“Suppose you were to intentionally fuck with the time line. The Time Institute might decide not to bring you back to the present.”

“Why would anyone intentionally fuck with the time line?”

“Exactly,” Ephrem said. “Don’t do that, and you’ll be fine.” He leaned over to touch a console on the wall, and a time line with photographs of people was suspended in the air between us. “I’ve been working on an investigation plan for you,” he said. “We don’t want to place you in the center of the anomaly, because we don’t know what the anomaly is, or how dangerous it might be. We want you to interview people who we think have seen it.”

He enlarged a very old photograph, black-and-white, of a worried-looking young man in military uniform. “This is Edwin St. Andrew, who experienced something in the forest at Caiette. You’ll visit him, and see if he’ll talk about it.”

“I didn’t know he was a soldier.”

“He won’t be when you speak with him. You’ll talk to him in 1912, and then later he’ll go on to have a very bad time on the Western Front. More tea?”

“Thank you.” I had no idea what the Western Front was and hoped it would be covered in my training.

He swiped the time line to the side, and I was looking at the composer from the footage Zoey had shown me. “In January 2020,” Ephrem continued, “an artist named Paul James Smith gave a performance that involved a video, and it seems like that video maybe shows the anomaly that St. Andrew described a century earlier, but we don’t know where exactly that video was taken. We don’t have complete footage of his concert, just the clip Zoey showed you. You’ll speak to him and see what you can learn.”