The Sixth Story in Retcon is Now Out!
Read on for an exclusive preview of "Unless Another Escapes to Tell Thee" Below
Greetings and salutations! I am quickly popping in from vacation to remind everyone that story six, “Unless Another Escapes to Tell Thee”, is now out! Here’s the blurb:
At first Mona thought that Noam, her counterpart as the head of the second lab in the secret time travel research group at Cornell, was simply a creep. But over tim e she begins to think he knows a secret she doesn’t—a secret that will change her life forever.
But, in what is undoubtedly an error, I put a lot more thought and care into writing the actual story than I do the blurb, so my suggestion is to go read that if you’re interested.
You can purchase it at all the various commercial sellers (Amazon • Amazon UK • Apple • Barnes and Noble • Kobo • Smashwords). You can also purchase it at my web site, where you can buy just the story itself, or (exclusive to there) buy a subscription to the entire series, which comes with all the past issues immediately and the others as they are published.
Incidentally, I know there are some people who are particularly interested in either stories with LGBT content or stories with Jewish content; it just so happens that this story in Retcon happens to feature the characters who bring both experiences to the fore. So if that’s your thing, this would be a great story to try.
And just to whet everyone’s appetite, here is the first section of the story (which, for reasons which will become apparent as you read the story, is labeled not “1” but “17”):
17.
Time travel is boring.
—Noam did not, of course, mean time visiting, time dwelling, or whatever you wish to call actually being in another time, the strangeness of all your instincts turned wrong, of colors a shade off and smells remixed, prices fallen and progress unwound. This he knew from his earlier brief excursions (yes, there had been one or two) would be as engrossing and terrifying as any spacial displacement resulting in an immersion within a strange culture. He remembered his trip to China, how bewildered he'd felt, how lost, even with Professor Wu right there at every moment to translate and explain. Of course, in the past, he'd be revisiting the lost, not traveling to a truly alien culture: he had once been fluent in that speech, practiced in those gestures; presumably it would come back to him in time. On his earlier trips he just hadn't stayed long enough, right? Or would the doubled lens sit ever before his eyes, for the rest of his already more-than-half wasted life? He did not know, not yet. He supposed it would be both familiar and strange, in some combination he could not yet conceive. But not boring: no, dwelling in the past would bring a thousand perils and humiliations and miseries, entail suffering of innumerable varieties and flavors: but not boredom.
No, what was boring was the travel.
Which is to say, time travel was like any other sort of travel, any act of not being but getting somewhere: an exhausting, uncomfortable, irritating, time-consuming, and stressful business, whose chief characteristic, sitting as the high king among the other unplesantries, was tedium: the heaps of shredded time: waiting to board the bus or to disembark the plane, watching as the agent looks for your record, the drawn-out lulls of a cross-country drive, the sitting in still vehicles, the dragging of luggage, the security lines, the over-priced waters, the fast-food, the waiting. Time travel, above and apart from everything else it was, was travel. Which is to say: dull.
H. G. Wells hadn't mentioned that part.
Most depictions of time travel he'd ever read or seen showed it as instantaneous, which (Noam decided as he twisted uncomfortably in his seat, unable to concentrate on any of the books he'd brought) made some sense as a guess, since time was precisely what was being overpassed. But it turned out it wasn't so: you moved through time within a bubble, and that bubble went only so fast, and in the meantime the traveler (stuck in timeβ) had to wait it out. This part, actually, Wells had gotten right, or almost: he'd shown his Traveler sitting and watching the world mutate before his eyes. He'd foreseen the waiting—but not the isolation. The problem was that the bounded space which traveled through time had to be wholly self-contained: nothing got in or out, not even light. Also, if you wanted to breathe, you had to bring your oxygen with you. No one was really sure what would happen if you tried to send something through time without it being hermetically sealed within saeculite: Wu seemed to think that the most likely result was that nothing would happen save a lot of energy being wasted, but since she thought that the other plausible result would be creating a massive explosion (the same explosion you'd get by transforming the to-be-translated mass into antimatter, which is to say larger than any nuke ever built), no one was ever going to try it. So isolation within a literal rock was imperative.
If tediousness is the most distinguishing feature of travel, then minor but prolonged discomfort is a close runner up. And time travel was characterized by that too. Indeed, as far as discomfort went, it was almost certainly worse than any other form of travel, save perhaps a space voyage—or being packed tight in a wooden crate and shipped steerage: to both of which it bore a rather miserable resemblance. It wasn't only oxygen that the isolation required hording: it also necessitated the recycling or storage of human wastes, and the carrying of energy sufficient to power the voyage. It would not be pushing matters too far to say that he was stuck inside a space ship: Lee, the engineer whom they'd hired for the basic design work the first time they sent a person far enough to require life support, had previously worked for NASA, and managed his task by adapting those designs to new purpose. So Noam was in a space capsule, just one which was going through dimension 4, not 1, 2 or 3. And as with any space voyage, not only did everything need to be both brought along and brought back (the ultimate carry-in/carry-out rule), mass was at a premium: it cost energy to push each gram, whichever way you wished to go. Not to mention that going back in time was like trying to lift up out of a gravity well: it required far more energy than falling back down.
Which didn't exactly leave space for the roomy sets of the TARDIS.
So here he was in a capsule about the size of a handicap stall in a public bathroom, in a literal airplane seat—they bought them from the same manufacturer—his body hooked up to a catheter and a colostomy bag, with just enough space to stand but with nowhere to walk. He stood anyway, just to use his legs, and amused himself by reaching out to either side to see if he could touch both walls of the capsule at once. Arms not quite long enough, just like the last dozen times he'd tried. And then, with no other options, he sat down again, and worried (well, groused) that his muscles would atrophy. No wonder time travelers collapsed at the completion of their translation, shaking, hardly able to stand: being in a small space like this was a recognized form of torture.
Three weeks.
Noam wondered idly what would happen if he got appendicitis, or had a heart attack. He supposed his corpse would simply evacuate at his destination (the controls were automated of necessity, since it's not as though any information to steer by could enter the bubble), and eventually be found, never identified, one more mysterious corpse to be briefly puzzled over then forgotten. What else could happen?
But that was all just woolgathering: he knew damn well he wouldn't die. He was as safe as any human being had ever been. After all, he'd already seen himself die, which meant he had to live until he replayed that scene from the other side. He had an unbreakable appointment with death, that could not be anticipated any more than canceled.
He couldn't decide whether or not that was a consolation.
Read the rest by picking up the story today at Amazon, Amazon UK, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, or at my web site.
I’ll see you all with a proper essay in September.