FULL BLOOM

A little gold cathedral spun down out of a sky blue as an absinthe flame, settling its belly on the Whitehouse lawn and sticking out its tongue. Photos of the woman on the ramp were consecrated under headlines before the chaos was locked down and the visitor transported to a bunker under the streets of Washington. Some observers could not conceal their disappointment at her humanity, when they had innocently expected a serrated lizard with fins galore. One expert sobbed because she was nothing like a hammerhead shark. The flying disc made it unlikely she was a random nutter, but there didn’t seem anything alien about her except maybe those big eyes, and the travel armour she shucked immediately: a purple-gold acid flake hinged carapace with headlamps for breasts and a shoulder-fender which flipped out to wings of semi-transparent chrome. She stated impassively that she was from twenty-five years in the future. It seemed their belief was not required. When asked why her timeship was circled with Chinese symbols (rendered in green flake) and no Western writing, she stated that the building of the craft had required the backing of a world power.

She was tall, blonde, strong as metal cable, aged anything between thirty and fifty, and presented as American. She bore no explosive device or other weapon. Fearing that she was the weapon, they scanned her. She was normal, skullparts zipped together with calcium in the usual way. She carried no exotic disease. The factions argued, right and left money with right and left military. She observed calmly that this was a class distinction, and they stopped only briefly to hate her.

Her ability to casually exit locked rooms was embarrassing not because she could do so, but because to confront her on the fact would be to acknowledge they had locked the door. She always returned, and seemed to be waiting for something. Surveillance footage of her cell was marred by her sitting as still as a statue - observers watching her face for hours in close-up soon imagined they saw strange transformations in the swarming static. Sudden blank tape presumably concealed activity she didn’t wish to broadcast. In any case their security was bankrupt, and attempts to shift or examine the time craft resulted in strange blackouts and loss of memory. The woman took one scientist aboard, who emerged describing something like a honeycomb of medals.

Attempts to gas her room or give her sedated meals resulted in her departure and days during which she was locked incommunicado within the disc. Her refusal to help them pretend they hadn’t attacked her was the last straw for the military, and when she finally mentioned her name, intelligence came up trumps - she was a young girl living in Cleveland, unremarkable, with the seed of an interest in languages and no connection with the Orient.

Interrogation of the girl yielded nothing - she didn’t know anything about her future self, and was merely frightened and worn down, especially when interrogation resulted in the loss of a kidney. But she and the older woman carried the same DNA.

Against scientists’ objections that a meeting between the two was inadvisable, the girl was shown into a bare cell where the woman was sat at a metal table, the meeting observed and recorded through a one-way mirror.

 

She was surprised at the fragility of the young girl who uncertainly sat down across from her. Spiky, fibrous and yet to ripen, she was yellow in the head and filled to innocence with others’ opinions. Etheric armatures of anxiety angled from her like insect legs. And strangely she had always carried within her the sweet and bitter secret that this, now, was the past.

She’d forgotten how terrible it was, the taste of youth in the mouth. The new-made jigsaw mask opposite made her relieved at her age. That she was wise enough to know she was being used, and that she could use it. With enough data to see at last the whole shape and put a cross through the centre of her life.

‘I’ve learned a vast amount. Every life I’ve heard of has been a meaningless oblivion. But you and I together might accomplish something.’

She reached across the table for the girl’s hand.

 

Something louder than sound was bending the window. Turning in mid-air, they were wrapped around eachother, arms and legs interwoven with the spiral of snow-white fire that coursed around and between them before exploding through the atomized glass. The blast blurred the bunker to dust and knocked an earthwave westward across the American continent. As the wave echoed back the land troughed open to a depth of four miles and, like a sandcastle moat, welcomed the filling sea.