The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📗

“The thing we do know, definitively,” Alice said, “is that the talent always manifests in a jump forward in time.”

“Why? If we can go back, why do we always go forward first?”

Arkady turned from staring out of the window. “Because, when you face death, you think: What can I do to save myself? What can I do next? You are thinking forward, you are hoping—do you understand me? Thinking and hoping forward, into the future. So you pull yourself there.”

“Okay . . .” Nick frowned. “I guess I understand that. But what about this big secret—that we can all jump back? How does that work?”

“It is very difficult,” Alice said. “It takes great concentration and training. You must reach back, back into yearnings and memories and feelings of the past. There are some times and places to which we cannot seem to go. We cannot jump in these places we call scars, where the feeling is carved into the very bedrock. We cannot jump to certain kinds of mass events—the destruction of Carthage, for example—events that are so intense, so complete in and of themselves, that they repel the past and the future. And we can’t use despair, which is inert. The feelings we use must reach outward. They must yearn, either forward or back.”

“But surely everywhere is a scar. Something terrible must have happened in this very spot. Some caveman killed another on . . .” Nick peered out the car window, looking for a street sign. “Right here on Shaftesbury Avenue, twenty thousand years ago.”

“Yes, certainly. Every inch of the world has been dappled by sadness and happiness. But I’m not talking about individuals and their feelings. Or even individual deaths. Those are drops of water, Nick. Just little drops. We travel on currents, on collective emotion. The feelings of humanity, not singular humans.”

“But on good feelings, not despair. Happiness.”

Alice smiled. “Happiness! So beautiful, but it is effervescent, individual. Hard to use. But yes, we usually choose to travel on what you might call good feelings, because it is more pleasant to do so. But what is a good feeling? Often that’s hard to determine. Everyone’s loss is someone else’s gain. Everyone’s bad time is someone else’s good time. Let’s say I want to go somewhere where they practice human sacrifice. We can sense the fear of the men who lay, generation after generation, beneath the priest’s knife. I could travel on that, but I might rather travel on their courageous exultation in having been chosen. Or most likely I would travel on the relief of the people whose world has been rebalanced by the offering.”

“Good lord.” Nick stared at her placid face. “Are you kidding? You travel on the feelings of whoever is benefiting from torture and oppression? The cannibal who is delighted with his meal?”

Alice smiled. “Or the marquess who enjoys sugar in his tea? You are such a true-blue subject of the Enlightenment, Lord Blackdown. It’s really quite endearing. Did I use the words torture and oppression?”

“Well then, what are you saying?”

“Simply this. We can use any swell of feeling produced by a culture, but feelings of completeness, of satisfaction—we prefer them. But really, no matter the flavor of the feeling, it is its movement, its propulsion away from the moment in which it is felt, that we use.”

The car made a sharp turn, and Nick held on to the strap. “And I could learn to do this?”

“Yes. If the Guild decides to train you. It takes a long time to learn to jump safely and with precision. I cannot tell you how complicated it is, to find the current that will take you where you want to go. Sometimes the most unlikely feeling will whisk you back. Your capacities for empathy must become so finely calibrated, Nick, that it barely feels like empathy anymore. Indeed, sometimes you will feel quite heartless.”

“Cry me a river.”

“You choose to scoff,” Alice said lightly. “But once you get to the past, the difficulty continues. Arkady will take you back, so you don’t have to worry about the journey itself. But you will find it difficult once you are there. For one thing, there will be your old self to contend with. And for another, you will not be able to change the future. Or rather, you will only be able to change the smallest things, things that get subsumed back into the big push of the river without making a difference.”

“No killing Hitler,” Nick said.

“No killing Hitler. No giving Queen Liliuokalani back her Hawaii, no saving Malcolm X, or Joan of Arc, or the princes in the tower. But smaller things—things that are just the normal, everyday stuff of life? Those things are perfectly possible. Fall in love, have children; who cares? Everyone else is doing it. You can even kill someone. These are tiny eddies in the river, nothing more.

“I can kill ‘someone,’ but not Hitler? That doesn’t make any sense. Has anyone ever tried to go back—or forward—and kill him?”

“There are only a very few individuals who really change the world, for better or worse, Nick. And it is the river that makes important men and women. Who am I to say—maybe if you were to kill Hitler, the river would simply provide another.”

Nick laughed, incredulous. “Who are you to say, Alice? You’re the Alderwoman!”

Arkady slammed his hands down on his thighs. “Why when we talk about time travel do we always have to kill Hitler or not kill Hitler! It is to make Hitler a commonplace! The point is this. You are small and the river is big. Live, love, die, my priest. The river will roll on.”

“It sounds to me as if you wish that were true. And you are afraid it isn’t.”

Alice and Arkady stared at him, their lips tightly closed.

“Fine,” Nick said after a moment of cold silence. “I shall keep my world-saving ambitions to a minimum, and take care not to sire a race of megalomaniacal killers.”

Something close to bitterness twisted Alice’s mouth. “And you think