The Time Traveler's Almanac

“Before you go on that expedition, do you think you could visit a person I think might enjoy talking to you?”

He smiled. “I suppose,” he said. “But I don’t see what difference it makes.”

“She’s a lot like you. I think you’d find her sympathetic.” And I told him where I lived and gave him my name. “But don’t tell her an old woman sent you, she’ll think I’m meddling. Just tell her it was a friend.”

“I promise.” He turned to leave. “Thank you, friend.” I watched him as he ambled down the pebbled path that would lead him to my home.

PALIMPSEST

Charles Stross

Charles Stross is an English science fiction, fantasy, and horror writer. His first piece of fiction, “The Boys”, was published in Interzone in 1987 and he’s been writing steadily ever since, with several novels and many short stories to his name. His fiction has won the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Prometheus Award. This novella, “Palimpsest,” won the Hugo Award in 2010 and was first published in his collection Wireless in 2009.

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This will never happen:

You will flex your fingers as you stare at the back of the youth you are going to kill, father to the man who will never now become your grandfather; and as you trail him home through the snowy night, you’ll pray for your soul, alone in the darkness.

Memories are going to come to you unbidden even though you’ll try to focus on the task in hand. His life – that part of it which you arrived kicking and squalling in time to share with him before the end – will pass in front of your eyes. You will remember Gramps in his sixties, his hands a bunch of raisin-wrinkled grape joints as he holds your preteen wrists and shows you how to cast the fly across the water. And you’ll remember the shrunken husk of his seventies, standing speechless and numb by Gran’s graveside in his too-big suit, lying at last alone in the hospice bed, breath coming shallow and fast as he sleeps alone with the cancer. These won’t be good memories. But you know the rest of the story too, having heard it endlessly from your parents: young love and military service in a war as distant as faded sepia photographs from another generation’s front, a good job in the factory and a wife he will quietly adore who will in due course give him three children, from one of whose loins you in turn are drawn. Gramps will have a good, long life and live to see five grandchildren and a myriad of wonders, and this boy-man on the edge of adulthood who you are compelled to follow as he walks to the recruiting office holds the seeds of the man you will remember … But it’s him or you.

Gramps would have had a good life. You must hold on to that. It will make what’s coming easier.

You will track the youth who will never be your grandfather through the snow-spattered shrubbery and long grass along the side of the railroad tracks, and the wool-and-vegetable-fiber cloth that you wear – your costume will be entirely authentic – chafes your skin. By that point you won’t have bathed for a week, or shaved using hot water: you are a young thug, a vagrant, and a wholly bad sort. That is what the witnesses will see, the mad-eyed young killer in the sweat-stained suit with the knife and his victim, so vulnerable with his throat laid open almost to the bone. He’ll sprawl as if he is merely sleeping. And there will be outrage and alarm as the cops and concerned citizens turn out to hunt the monster that took young Gerry from his family’s arms, and him just barely a man: but they won’t find you, because you’ll push the button on the pebble-sized box and Stasis Control will open up a timegate and welcome you into their proud and lonely ranks.

When you wake up in your dorm two hundred years-objective from now, bathed in stinking fear-sweat, with the sheet sucking onto your skin like a death-chilled caul, there will be nobody to comfort you and nobody to hold you. The kindness of your mother’s hands and the strength of your father’s wrists will be phantoms of memory, ghosts that echo round your bones, wandering homeless through the mausoleum of your memories.

They’ll have no one to remember their lives but you; and all because you will believe the recruiters when they tell you that to join the organization you must kill your own grandfather, and that if you do not join the organization, you will die.

(It’s an antinepotism measure, they’ll tell you, nodding, not unkindly. And a test of your ruthlessness and determination. And besides, we all did it when it was our turn.)

Welcome to the Stasis, Agent Pierce! You’re rootless now, an orphan of the time stream, sprung from nowhere on a mission to eternity. And you’re going to have a remarkable career.

Yellowstone