The Time Traveler's Almanac

“No,” I say regretfully. But damn it, a part of me still hopes that it’s all true.

“They’re probably going to institutionalise me. All of us.”

The front door opens. Sunil is running out to the car, a gravid Babette following more slowly.

“You have to help me, Greg. Please? We’re going to outlive all our captors. We will get out. But in the meantime…”

She pulls the shell out of her pocket, offers it to me on her tiny palm. “Please keep it safe for me?”

She opens the car door. “It’s your ticket to the future,” she says, and gets out of the car to greet her parents.

I lied. I fucking hate kids.

THE TIME TELEPHONE

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is a University of London professor and writer of science fiction, the most recently published of his fourteen novels being Jack Glass (Gollancz 2012) and Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (Gollancz 2013). He lives a little way west of London, England, with his wife, two children, and no cats. “The Time Telephone” was first published in Infinity Plus in 2002.

1.

A mother phones her daughter. The call costs her nearly €18,000. The number she dials is several hundred digits long, but it has been calculated carefully and stored as a series of tones, so the dialling process takes only seconds. The ring tone at the far end makes its distant musical drumroll once, twice, three times, and with a clucking noise the receiver is lifted.

‘Hello?’

The mother takes a quick breath. ‘Marianne?’

‘Speaking. Who’s this, please?’

‘This is your mother, Marianne.’

‘Ma? I thought you were in Morocco. You calling from Morocco?’

‘No, dear, I’m here, I’m in London.’

‘Here?’

‘This is a call from the past, my darling,’ says the mother, her heart stabbing at her ribs. ‘As I speak now, as I speak to you now, I’m actually pregnant with you. You’re inside my tummy here, and I’m speaking to you there.’

For a moment there is only the polluted silence of a phone line; that slightly hissing, leaf-rustle emptiness of a line where the person at the other end is quiet. Then the daughter says, ‘Wow, ma. Really?’

‘Yes my dear.’

‘It’s that time telephone thing? Yeah? I read about that, or, or I watched a thing about it, on TV. You’re really calling me from the past?’

‘Yes my dear. I have a question I want to ask you.’

‘Wow, ma. Like, wow. I watched this programme about it on TV, it was a whole big thing, like, decades ago. And now it’s actually happening to me! And I’m only on a, like, regular phone.’

‘It uses the ordinary phone system, you know.’

‘It’s incredible, though. Isn’t it?’

‘I want to ask you this thing, my darling, and I want you to answer truthfully. I know that you are sixteen there, aren’t you. Aren’t you?’

‘Sweet sixteen.’

‘Well, from where I’m calling you’re not born yet. So I want to ask you.’ She takes a breath. ‘Are you glad you were born? Are you pleased to have come into the world?’ The drizzly silence of the phone line. ‘I mean the question absolutely seriously, my darling, absolutely. I mean the question, in the way that a child will say…’ But she finds it hard to find the words. ‘The way a child will say I hate you, I wish I’d never been born. That’s an unbearable thing for a parent to hear, my darling. Do you see?’

‘You’re weirding me out, ma. This whole conversation is weirding me out. This whole concept is weirding me out.’

‘But I have to ask it of you, because now you’re sixteen, you can tell me. Are you glad you were born?’

‘Sure.’

‘Are you sure? Really sure?’

‘Ok, sure I’m sure, I’m really sure.’

Which is what the mother hoped to hear. She even sighs. And the remainder of the question is conversational scree, just talk about the weather and the chit-chat. So I go to Morocco? Well, yeah, ma. Hey, Scannell just won the board championship. You should make a bet. You could be rich. I don’t think it works that way, my darling. You look after yourself. Hey, you too. That sort of thing. You know the sort of thing, the sort of chit-chat a mother and daughter will make on the phone.

2.