This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

Few of Red’s fellow operatives would have sensed that opposing presence. Red knows only because Red is patient, solitary, careful. She studied for this engagement. She modeled it backward and forward in her mind. When ships were not where they were supposed to be, when escape pods that should have been fired did not, when certain fusillades came thirty seconds past their cue, she noticed. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

Red has done what she came to do, she thinks. But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or her child does, or a smuggler she trades jackets with in some distant spaceport. And all this blood for nothing.

A tremor passes through the soil—do not call it earth. The planet dies. Crickets chirp. Crickets survive, for now, among the crashed ships and broken bodies on this crumbling plain. Silver moss devours steel, and violet flowers choke the dead guns. If the planet lasted long enough, the vines that sprout from the corpses’ mouths would grow berries. It won’t, and neither will they.

The planet waits for its end. Vines live, yes, and crickets, though no one’s left to see them but the skulls.

Thus we braid Strand 6 to Strand 9, and our glorious crystal future shines so bright I gotta wear shades, as the prophets say.

Not every battle’s grand, not every weapon fierce. Even we who fight wars through time forget the value of a word in the right moment, a rattle in the right car engine, a nail in the right horseshoe . . . It’s so easy to crush a planet that you may overlook the value of a whisper to a snowbank.

I imagine you laughing at this letter, in disbelief. I have seen you laugh, I think—in the Ever Victorious Army’s ranks, as your dupes burned the Summer Palace and I rescued what I could of the Emperor’s marvelous clockwork devices. You marched scornful and fierce through the halls, hunting an agent you did not know was me.

It flatters me to find you so attentive. Be assured that I’ll have looked long and hard at you while you assembled my little art project. Will you go still or turn sharply when you know that I’m watching you? Will you see me? Imagine me waving, in case you don’t; I’ll be too far off for you to see my mouth. Just kidding. I’ll be long gone by the time the wind turns right. Made you look, though, didn’t I?

The letter begins in the tree’s heart. Rings, thicker here and thinner there, form symbols in an alphabet no one present knows but Red. The words are small, sometimes smudged, but still: ten years per line of text, and many lines. Mapping roots, depositing or draining nutrients year by year, the message must have taken a century to craft.

How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol horde got bored?

Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.

Her hand does not shake as she slices into the skin. Her breath comes even. She’s kept her gloves clean, for the most part, but now she stains them red as a name.

Atlantis sinks. Serves it right. Red hates the place.

Atlantises. No crystals here, no flying cars, no perfect governments, no psychic powers. (Those last two things don’t exist, anyway.)

Also, standardized spelling wasn’t yet a feature of English. Forging someone’s handwriting was wasted effort if you didn’t also learn their idiosyncratic orthography.

We make so much of lettercraft literal, don’t we? Whacked seals aside. Letters as time travel, time-travelling letters. Hidden meanings.

Humans need marks to strive for—but imperfect systems decay. So we build them ideals. Change agents climb upthread, find helpful strands, preserve what matters, and let what doesn’t fall to dust: mulch for the more perfect future’s seed.

Mrs. Leavitt suggests relying on metaphors one’s correspondent—that’s you, I think?—will find meaningful. I confess I don’t entirely know what’s meaningful to you. I fall back on assumptions: seeds and grass, growing things. It verges on stereotype. And when you write me, you write in furnace and in flame.

It all seemed very romantic to me at the time. So I left my pod and wandered upthread and far away, far from the chatter and the mutual observation. I found a hilltop on a small world, breathable but barren, and I stood there like Socrates in the comic book, lost in thought, weight on one foot, and I did not move. The sun set. The stars rose. (They are a rose, right? Or something? Dante said that.) I realized that as my ears grew used to the silence, I could still hear the others: Our chatter swarmed the heavens; our voices echoed from the stars. This was not how Socrates stood, or Li Bai or Qu Yuan either. My isolation, my experiment, had caused a small sensation among those who cared for me, and for whom I cared, and that sensation spread. Lenses and eyes turned upon me.

It feels harder to write than it should. It feels easier to write than it should, as well. I’m contradicting myself. The geometers would be ashamed.

Each being’s entitled to her privacy, so I refused to let them see me. I was the only person on that tiny rock, and I made the world go dark.

Quechua sailors and fisherman know the shapes of the wind, can sail through any storm, rate themselves equal to any wave. The western ocean’s horizon has always seemed a wall to them: Beyond this rests the world’s end.

Fortunately, geniuses understand that young men are often fools.

So they sought the wisest being they knew: Each, separately, climbed the many thousand steps to the mountain peak, and on audience day they knelt before the current emperor’s great-grandfather, mummified upon his throne, gold- and jewel-bedecked, radiant with age and command, and offered their gifts to him. And the secret priests who wait behind the emperor’s thrones are not young, nor are they all men, and they can frame two points into a line.

(Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.)

Will the people of Tawantinsuyu brave the ocean their murderers will one day call the Pacific, and, finding the swift currents, travel to the Philippines, or even farther, as others have traveled before? Will they, crossing waters so unfished that all a woman need do to eat is dart her hand beneath the waves and pull the fish up wriggling and silver, find new civilizations and make conquest, or common cause? Will this alliance and trade, stretched across the Pacific, save Tawantinsuyu when Pizarro’s grotesque sails belly up from the south? Will, at the least, early contact with Eurasian plagues strengthen these people against them? Or: Will the tradesmen make it so far as a China ruled by the Ming, soon to reel from an enormous currency crisis that will bring the empire to its knees—a currency crisis brought on by the shifting exchange rate between copper cash and silver, of which the people of Tawantinsuyu sport an ample supply? Stabilized, will the Ming duck the four-century cycle of empires’ rise and fall, and endure, growing, transforming, expanding to keep pace with the West’s slow Enlightenment and its overweening Industrial Revolution?

When the sun’s set, she takes the unraveled thread, snips it into lengths, and throws each length into the receding tide. Stars shine, and the moon. A dark shape slips along bright waves and dives. One by one, the seeker gathers the strands and ties them about her wrist so tight her fingers pale and stiffen. She makes a fist, tenses. Her skin splits beneath the cord and closes over it again. Red, who’s waited motionless on the shore since sundown, sees something like a seal against the waves of light, and wonders.

I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me.

I look at you, Red, and see much of myself: a desire to be apart, sometimes, to understand who I am without the rest.

So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.

I’ve learned to take warning from delight.

Blue is still thinking of larvae when she sees Red. Time stops. Blue carries nothing with her between strands except knowledge, purpose, tactics, and Red’s letters. Memory is tipped and decanted into Garden, life to life to life, always deepening, thickening, growing new roots and efficiencies—but Red’s letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers’ tips, between the lines of her palms. She presses them against her teeth before kissing her marks, reads them over when she shifts her grip on motorcycle handles, dusts soldiers’ chins with them in bar fights and barracks games. She thinks without thinking, often, of what she will name Red in her next letter—hides her lists in plausibly deniable dreamscapes, on the undersides of milkweed leaves, in shed chrysalis and wingtip. Vermillion Lie. Scarlet Tanager. Parthian Thread. My Red, Red Rose. She looks at Red—thirteen, alone, vulnerable, so impossibly fragile and small—and a letter rises in her throat like bile. I wanted to be seen.

She does not run the scenarios. She does not think, did Garden send me here to test me, does Garden know, does Garden want me to watch her die? She thinks nothing as the roots tense and twitch, as the planet blooms a mouth, a face, a body, a vastness rearing silent as owl flight in the perfect dark, a hunger with eyes and teeth, bred for silent, waiting years to scent one specific set of nanoscopic implants, to hatch and devour one bright red element of its surroundings. It looks a little like a lion, truth be told—mane of pale blue cilia, maw worthy of cinematic roars, though it will never make a sound—but for the size, the number of legs, the wings. It steps out onto the cold, sharp ground. It sniffs the air, inclines its head in Red’s direction. Blue tears out its throat.

She carries her hunger like a compass rose (stars rose—they are a rose, right?), walks due south away from the north to which it points.

Tremors spread from a traveler’s foot, and though no other spider has grown so attuned to your tread as I have, the others aren’t deaf.

And this letter is a knife at my neck, if cutting’s what you want.

So in this letter I am yours. Not Garden’s, not your mission’s, but yours, alone. I am yours in other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery; yours as I review your words by their sequence, their sound, smell, taste, taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours.

A shadow follows her. She has no proof, but she knows, as bones know their breaking stress.

Red wrote too much too fast. Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself. She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt. But butterfly wings break when touched. Red knows her own weaknesses as well as anyone. She presses too hard, breaks what she would embrace, tears what she would touch to her teeth.

Always a balancing act, of course, to give without losing, to support without weakening.

Even poetry, which breaks language into meaning—poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do.

How embarrassing. I’m quite certain I’ve never rambled a day in my life before this. Another thing to give you: this first, for me.

I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.

Red wins a battle between starfleets in the far future of Strand 2218. As the great Gallumfry lists planetward, raining escape pods, as battle stations wilt like flowers tossed into flame, as radio bands crackle triumph and swiftskimmers swoop after fleeing voidtails, as guns speak their last arguments into mute space, she slips away. The triumph feels stale and swift. She used to love such fire. Now it only reminds her of who’s not there.

You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbours do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought. Instead I wick the longing into thread, pass it through your needle eye, and sew it into hiding somewhere beneath my skin, embroider my next letter to you one stitch at a time.

While so enmeshed—knotting grass to grackle scold, the smell of leaf mold to sun’s azimuth—a tree swallow swoops near, scissors her peripheral vision, severs her from trancing reverie with its dissonance. It flashes blue at her eyes’ edge, stuns her with its unaccountable presence. There are tree swallows aplenty, but this one is wrong: This one approaches an empty nest in autumn, a nest that she was near to harvesting to show her nephew and teach him about how much weaving can be learned from birds.

I sing myself out to you, and my talons clutch the branch, and I am wrung out until your next letter gives me breath, fills me to bursting.

I miss you in the field. I miss defeat. I miss the chase, the fury. I miss victories well earned. Your fellows have their intrigues and their passions, and now and again a clever play, but there’s none so intricate, so careful, so assured. You’ve whetted me like a stone. I feel almost invincible in our battles’ wake: a kind of Achilles, fleet footed and light of touch. Only in this nonexistent place our letters weave do I feel weak. How I love to have no armor here.

In Asoka’s court, an acrobat, she climbs, flips, turns, sifting a thousand-person crowd for a single predator, one watcher who should not be there. She smells the shadow, and smells it slip away. She storms the falling walls of Jericho, and in dense streets she hears a footstep on stone that does not belong. She turns, draws, lets fly. An arrow embeds itself in stone. She races gravcycles through a crystal forest coursing with the brilliant pulse of human beings whose physical bodies have been rendered, like bacon fat, until the fragrance of their minds expands to fill all space. Whatever she is seeking, whatever’s seeking her, it does not catch her there, though she does not catch it in return.

All good stories travel from the outside in.