The Woman Who Died a Lot

“It was a popular place for timejackers to hang out. The Epochal Badlands, we would have called them. A jump into the Upper Jurassic was usually a safe escape. Not for deWitt. Twenty million years, and she knew each hour like the back of her hand. She was the one who tracked down ‘Fingers’ Lomax, hiding out after the Helium Heist of ’09. Or at least she would have.”

“She said you were going to have a weekend retreat in the Late Pleistocene.”

“I was going to have a lot of things. She and I would have been very close, so I got some of her potential future in my own Letter of Destiny. How will she turn out now?”

“Not great,” I replied, handing him the forks. “Two unremarkable kids, a husband she doesn’t like—and then she gets hit by a car in 2041.”

“Same year as me,” mused Friday.

I stopped folding the napkins. “You never told me you only make it to fifty-five.”

“Bummer, isn’t it?” said Friday with a shrug. “Thirty-seven years to go and counting.”

I stared at him for a while and felt a heavy feeling of grief in my heart. It was over three decades away, so I didn’t feel the loss quite yet, just the notion that I was going to outlive him. And that wasn’t how it was meant to happen.

“But there’s an upside,” he added.

“There is?”

“Sure. I miss HR-6984 slamming into the earth by three days.”

“That might not happen.”

“I’ll never know whether it does or it doesn’t.”

“What else happens to you?”

“My future’s my own, Mum.”

“Okay, okay,” I said quickly, since we’d covered this ground before, “forget I asked. Have you thought any more about university or a career?”

“No.”

I pondered for a moment.

“You know, your sister needs a lab assistant she can trust,” I said, “and she’ll pay you well. There’s a career there ready and waiting.”

“Mum, Tuesday’s work is Tuesday’s work. My life lies along a different path. I was going to be important—I was going to do wonderful things. I would have been head of the ChronoGuard and saved an aggregate seventy-six billion lives. Shazza and I would have made love on the veranda of my place in the Pleistocene while the mastodons bellowed at one another across the valley. I would have been there at Mahatma Winston Smith Al-Wazeed’s historic speech to the citizens of the world state at Europolis in 3419, and listened to his last words as he lay dying in my arms, and then implemented them. But now I don’t. All gone. Not going to happen. Mum, I don’t have any function. No kids, no wife, no achievements, nothing. I die aged fifty-five, my life essentially . . . wasted.”

There was silence for a moment. We stopped setting the table, and I gave him a hug. One of those strong Mum hugs that always do some good, no matter how bad things happen to be.

“Listen,” I said, “you don’t know for certain there are no good times. They didn’t give you a full view of the future, did they?”

“No,” he said, “it’s always a summary. A side of letter-size paper on what we would have done and the same again of what we will. An entire life compressed into barely five hundred words.”

“Right,” I said, “so you don’t know for certain you won’t a have a few boffo laughs and some good times, now, do you?”

“What’s going on?” asked Landen, who happened to be walking past the open door of the dining room.

“Friday’s lost his life function,” I said.

“He looks fairly alive to me.”

“No, no, his purpose. His raison d’être.”

“Everyone has a function,” said Landen, coming in to lay a comforting hand on his son’s shoulder, “even if he doesn’t know what it is. Some of us are lucky enough to have a clear function. I wasn’t sure what mine was for a while, until I realized it was to support your mother—and make sure you and Tuesday survived into adulthood.”

“Don’t forget Jenny,” I said.

“Yeah, her, too. Yours might not be obvious right now or even known—but it’s there. Everyone has a function. A small role to play in the bigger picture.”

Friday detached himself from my arms and continued to set the table. “You’re wrong, both of you. Here’s the thing: My life didn’t even warrant a full sheet of paper. This Friday at 1402 and four seconds, I murder someone. I’m in custody by the evening. In three months’ time, I’m sentenced to twenty-two years in the clink. Fifteen years into my sentence, I stab Danny ‘The Horse’ Bomperini to death in the prison laundry. It was self-defense but the courts don’t see it that way. My sentence is extended. I finally get out on February first, 2041. A few days later, I’m found in the car park of Sainsbury’s. It looks like they used a baseball bat, and the police never find who did it.”

There was silence. It explained the sullen mood he’d been in ever since his future had arrived from the Union of Federated Timeworkers.

“My money’s on the Bomperini family,” said Landen thoughtfully. “Payback for offing the Horse, y’know.”

“Landen!” I scolded. “This is serious shit we’re talking here.”