The linen room door slammed open, and Mariette nearly dropped the towel she was folding. She tried to be very still and didn’t turn around. The stump of her left knee ached inside the leather cup of her peg leg.
“You!” The plantation foreman Zeke sounded annoyed and worried. “Girl! Go on up to Doc Bronson’s lab.”
Her heart beat faster and her vision seemed to go dark at the edges. She focused on folding the towel just so. Told herself that it was just the sharp odor of the lye soap that was making tears rise in her eyes. There were four other girls working shoulder to shoulder with her—the Master had seven legitimate children and it took nearly that many slaves to handle all their laundry—so he could have meant any of them. Couldn’t he? But deep down she knew that since she was the only girl in the room who still had all her fingers, he had to be calling her out. Dr. Bronson only wanted helpers with good hands.
Oh, Lord, please don’t let him mean me, she prayed. Ain’t it enough I lost my leg? I got to lose my mind and my life, too?
“Girl!” Zeke’s huge, calloused hand landed on her shoulder and spun her around. The tip of her peg skidded on the polished floor and she nearly fell.
He glowered down at her, his gray eyes bloodshot from sun and smoke and rum. “You deaf, girl?”
“No sir,” she stammered. The other girls were staring at her; she could practically feel their relief like the ocean breeze upon her sweating skin. “I’m sorry. I didn’t ‘spect you meant me?”
“I do mean you. Get on up to the lab.”
“He need fresh linens?” Please, Lord, let it be that he just needs sheets or a towel or a clean chamber pot.
“I reckon he probably does, but that damn fool Bo touched something he shouldn’t and now what little brains he had are drippin’ out his ears.”
She froze again. Dr. Bronson’s laboratory had only been up on the hill for a year but already six boys had gone in as assistants and been carried out weeks later, stone dead or babbling with madness. Rumor was that Dr. Bronson’s research back in London had killed so many working-class apprentices that eventually the boys’ grieving parents revolted and burned the laboratory to the ground. Dr. Bronson escaped across the Atlantic with his life and lab books and sought refuge at his cousin’s Barbados sugar plantation.
Nobody quite knew what was going on inside the laboratory, nor would Mr. Turner speak of the arrangement he’d made with the scientist. Some folks whispered that Dr. Bronson had promised Mr. Turner tremendous riches if his research succeeded. They said that surely Dr. Bronson was trying to create a Philosopher’s stone to turn lead into gold. Others said that Mr. Turner was desperate to save his eldest son Johnny from the dissolution and vicious rages he’d flown into ever since the young man returned from a stint in the British navy. If the doctor had promised a cure, then perhaps he was driving his slave assistants mad on purpose to test remedies for Johnny. But if not…Mariette shuddered.
The foreman cuffed her on the side of her head, making her ear ring painfully. “Quit yer dawdlin’ and get up there! If I catch you lollygaggin’ I’ll take you to Johnny. You want that?”
For a moment, Mariette thought she might faint, but she forced herself to say, “No sir.”
Her mind fogged with terror, she moved like one of the clockwork men of Boston as she loaded a set of towels and a fresh set of sheets into a basket and marched out of the linen room. Whatever horrors awaited her in the laboratory, they would be far better than being a plaything for Johnny Turner.
He was the reason she’d lost her leg. After Johnny returned from the navy, his father made him foreman over the family’s sugar cane plantation, reasoning that with his military experience his eldest would maintain good order and keep the slaves productive. Mr. Turner didn’t mind if his boys satisfied their male urges on female slaves or entertained themselves by thinking up ever-more-gruesome ways of tormenting recaptured runaways. He was fond of saying, “A scared slave is a hard worker. Make them fear you more than they fear God and you’ll always have a bountiful crop.”
But Mr. Turner was first and foremost a businessman; as much as he figured slaves needed harsh discipline and that his sons needed to blow off a little steam now and then, he’d sunk good money into his slaves and didn’t want to see his property damaged without reason. Johnny started carrying a boarding axe he’d kept from his navy days and anytime a slave displeased him, he’d lop off one of their fingers, starting with the pinkie. Some slaves healed up well enough but others got infections and lost hands, arms, even their lives. And the doctoring got expensive. It was Mariette’s own crippling that finally made Mr. Turner lock Johnny in his rooms and bring Zeke down from South Carolina to work as his new foreman.
When Mariette was ten, a slave named Tom ran away and was recaptured when he tried to stow away on a ship bound for London. The slave catchers brought him back beaten half to death, but that wasn’t good enough for Johnny. He made the slaves build a gibbet in the yard and hung Tom from it by his arms. Then Johnny made the slaves pile dry brush beneath him and light it. He made all the slaves stand in a circle around the gibbet and watch as Tom screamed and slowly burned to death.
Mariette stayed rooted to the spot, but when the flesh started peeling off Tom’s feet, she closed her eyes. Johnny noticed her averted gaze and flew into a rage.
“You watch as long as I tell you to watch!” He pulled his Bowie knife from his belt and stabbed the blade through her bare foot into the red dirt.
She remembered the sudden mind-breaking pain, and then everything going black. The days after that were hazy in her memory. She remembered lying on her mother’s cot in their tiny coral hut, her mother trying to get her to drink some bitter medicinal draught. Then there was the horror of waking up to find herself strapped to a board, a leather strip in her mouth to keep her from biting off her own tongue or breaking her teeth, and the physician from Bridgetown heating his bone saw in the fire while telling her mother, “Hold her down. This won’t take but a minute.”
When she finally awoke from the fever, her leg was gone from a few inches below her knee and she was so weak that all she could do was polish silverware in the manor. Her weakness lasted close to a year; Mr. Turner seemed regretful and had his own family physician check on her to make sure her wound healed as well as possible. Mariette was light-skinned enough to be a presentable house slave, but the frowns that Mrs. Turner cast in her direction made her begin to suspect that the man who put her in her mother might have been Mr. Turner himself. Even though Johnny was seldom allowed outside, the mere mention of his name caused an unparalleled terror amongst the slaves throughout the whole parish.
I’ll survive this, Mariette vowed to herself as she marched up the hill to the laboratory. She could hear the chug of the steam-powered generator behind the building. It ran day and night and reminded her of a cabless locomotive with no track or cars. Heat from the engine made the air above the laboratory shimmer like a mirage. Her peg leg was sticking in the muddy road and pulling it free over and over hurt her knee and hip and made the leather straps around her thigh chafe. I don’t know how I’ll survive, but I will.
* * * *
“Come in!” Dr. Bronson called in response to her knock. “The door’s not locked.”
Mariette went inside. Her breath fogged in the frigid air. How could it possibly be so cold inside when it was so hot outdoors? She shivered in her thin cotton shift.
The layout of the laboratory seemed similar to the first floor of the plantation manor— Mr. Turner had hired the same architect for both. But whereas the Turners had made their entry hall into a light, airy parlor with comfortable seats, Dr. Bronson had blocked off all the windows with heavy oak bookshelves whose boards bowed under the weight of leather-bound tomes and wooden shipping boxes filled with manuscripts and correspondence. The only chair in the room sat behind a candle-lit writing desk piled with more books and papers. Deprived of sunlight and only dimly illuminated by the desk candles and gaslamps guttering in sconces, the room seemed as oppressive as a mortuary. The strange chemical stink in the air added to her goose-fleshed feeling that she’d stepped into a house of death.
“Hm.” A tall, thin man of about fifty stepped from a shadow and approached her, leaning heavily on a silver-filigreed cane. He looked her up and down, disappointment clear on his gaunt, clean-shaven face. “I told the foreman to send me a boy.”
Mariette set the linen basket down, mind racing to pick the words least likely to anger the scientist. “I reckon Zeke couldn’t find any to send. All the men are needed for the cane harvest.”
“Hm.” His eyes fell on her peg. “Did you lose your leg in the fields? I’m told that a cane knife can cut a grown man nearly in two.”
She shook her head. “I disobeyed Master Johnny.”
“Ah. Of course. Well, I hope you intend to be more obedient here, because you’ll be handling lethal substances and a failure to follow my instructions will have dire consequences.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll have you know that I do not approve of this peculiar institution of African slavery,” he remarked. “The Empire should have abolished it when I was just a lad. But alas, the House of Commons rejected the Slavery Abolition Act and no one has resurrected it. I expect that it has not seemed an urgent matter ever since Charles da Vinci began producing his wondrous clockwork men.”
Dr. Bronson sighed wistfully. “The best plantations have already replaced their black chattel with gleaming automatons. I keep telling my dear cousin that he should modernize his operation and replace the lot of you, but he insists that he needs your wits as well as your backs. I have my doubts as to what kind of wits are necessary to cut cane, but I do concede that the mechanical men are rather dear, and of course cannot produce more of their kind. One cannot deny the fertility of negro women.”
He grimaced. “In the meantime, whites are forced to share their civilization with Africans, which inevitably leads to…miscegenation.”
The simultaneously leering and disdainful look he gave her made her flush with anger, and she could not stay silent. “I was born here in Barbados. So was my mama, and her mama. We’re Bajan. I don’t know anything about Africa.”
Fortunately, Dr. Bronson seemed to take her words as a statement of ignorance rather than a rebuttal to his declarations.
“I have visited that Dark Continent on several occasions, and it is a wonder.” He smiled down at her. “So much gold, ivory, and diamonds! The wildlife and landscape…amazing. Truly Africa is wasted on Africans. The best thing for the place will be for European nations to colonize the whole continent and take charge of its natural resources.”
“What about the Africans who live there?” She struggled to keep her tone neutral.
“Indeed! I do have a plan I intend to propose when the time is right; I admit that my reputation has become somewhat tarnished, but I fully expect that the success of my endeavors here will result in considerable acclaim. My ship shall rise on a very high tide indeed, and royals from all countries should rightly seek my advice on intellectual matters.
“But I digress. Aside from the problem of Africans, England and Europe face the problem of the underclass. Mostly people of corrupted Irish, Gyptian, and Spanish blood, you know. Those in poverty breed disease, commit crimes and foster wretchedness. Some of my colleagues think we should let the poor starve. Natural selection! But tenderhearted women and religious sorts are forever running soup kitchens and charities and the human corruption keeps spreading.
“What I propose is that we offer a low-cost, nutritionally-sound potted food to the English and European poor. The food would be spiced with silphium and asafoetida to induce infertility in the women who eat it. Thus, the poor will stay healthy enough to serve as useful workers or soldiers, but they’ll stop breeding like confounded rabbits. The poor shall only exist as needed to turn the wheels of commerce. Civilization will prosper like never before!”
Mariette blinked. “That seems like a well-turned plan, sir. But what has it got to do with Africans?”
“Ah! I thought that bit was implied. Africans will serve as the meat component of the canned food. I have extensively plotted the logistics, and they’re entirely economical. By the time our canneries run out of Negroes, I expect the underclass breeding problem will have been splendidly remedied.”
Mariette’s heart pounded and her vision was starting to go edge-dark again. In her mind, she carefully removed her peg leg and with both hands drove it straight through Bronson’s loathsome chest, mud and all.
Instead, she took a deep breath, bent and picked up the linen basket, keeping her head down for fear that her eyes might show her rage. She knew she needed a few moments alone to calm herself down. Because if she was not very, very calm, she would die in this house, and Bronson would move on to the next hapless girl.
She’d spent her whole life hearing people, even other slaves, say that the world would be a better place without Negroes in it. It was common sport for the plantation owners to gather at a fish fry or around a card table to complain bitterly about the blacks who were responsible for their livelihoods. If she had a penny for every well-heeled planter who’d declared his slaves were lazy, worthless good-for-nothings who should be fed to the hogs simply because they needed to rest once in a while, she’d have been able to buy her own freedom.
Bronson’s vile sentiments were common as scuttle crabs, but usually just the idle spouts of spoiled old men. The scientist clearly had ambitions and a twisted moral conviction driving him. Might his monstrous plans reach the ears of equally monstrous people who could make them real?
If there was any chance he might succeed, he had to be stopped. Even if it meant she died under Johnny’s hatchet. In her mind, she saw herself creeping up to the laboratory house, blocking the doors shut with timber, and dousing it with lamp oil. It was easy and terrible to imagine Bronson screaming as he burned inside with all his notes.
But perhaps there was a better way that didn’t end in fire? She wouldn’t know until she found out what he was trying to do. Mr. Turner had surely not brought Bronson here to refine his plans to turn Africans into potted meat. The laboratory work must have something to do with curing Johnny’s madness…or anyhow the doctor had convinced Mr. Turner that it did.
“Would you like me to change your bedclothes, sir?”
“Certainly, but be quick about it; I’ll need you in the lab shortly.”
* * * *
Mariette followed Bronson into a short hallway that was even colder than the foyer study, and she could more clearly hear the chug of the steam engine along with the electrical hum of some other kind of apparatus. Twin gaslights brightly illuminated the hall, which only had room for a narrow table along one wall and a rail of wooden coat hooks along the other. A couple of long, padded canvas coats and brass goggles hung from the rack.
“Remove anything you might have in your pockets and leave it on the table.” Bronson frowned at her peg leg. “Is that secured with iron or steel nails?”
She shook her head. “It has bronze buckles and such, but the rest is leather and wood.”
“Any iron or steel at all?”
“No sir.”
“Good. Do you know letters and numbers?”
“Only a little.” Mariette’s heart beat fast at the lie. Unlike most of the slaves on the plantation, she had learned to read quite well, but her instincts were telling her that she should keep her knowledge close to her bosom. Bronson needed to underestimate her.
As a house slave, Mariette was expected to follow simple directions and recipes and to take messages from visitors. And so she’d been taught to read and write along with Mr. Turner’s youngest children. Her lessons ended once she knew practical words like “fish” and “sugar” and “cup”.
But while Mariette was still recovering from her amputation, Mr. Turner’s mother Helen—possibly her own grandmother, she now realized—started to go blind. Helen loved penny dreadfuls shipped in from England and read them by the boxload until her vision began to fail. None of Mr. Turner’s legitimate children had the time for (or interest in) reading to their granny. And so the elder Mrs. Turner enlisted Mariette to read her stories and London newspapers aloud to her. It was hard, at first, but the old lady was eager enough for entertainment and company that she patiently gave Mariette the proper pronunciations once she spelled out unfamiliar words.
“You best not let on to anyone how well you can read,” Mrs. Turner said one day when Mariette brought in her afternoon tea. “Folks don’t trust slaves with too-sharp minds. Can’t say I blame them, but I reckon you’re one of the good ones, so it can be our little secret.”
The old lady’s words were a cozy lambswool shawl draped over a cane knife: Displease me, and I’ll destroy you.
But Mariette was adept at keeping her perhaps-grandmother happy. The girl’s starving mind absorbed the informal tutoring, and soon she was sneaking into the library at night and reading more difficult books, puzzling them out by candlelight with the aid of the huge cloth-bound copy of Johnson’s Dictionary that roosted on the bottom shelf. During the day, she took great care to dust the library thoroughly so that no one would see the tracks of books being pulled from shelves.
She read the entire works of Shakespeare, and but kept returning to his play The Tempest. It was mostly because of the magic-filled story, which she could easily picture happening there on Barbados. But it was also because of Caliban and Miranda. She hated him for trying to rape her, but at the same time she thought that he was right to resent her father Prospero, who pretended he’d done Caliban a favor by enslaving him. And Miranda had no freedom at all, even though she got her handsome prince. The play’s happy ending didn’t fully satisfy her mind, and she felt compelled to re-read it, as if the words would rearrange themselves and some other ending might emerge.
If there had been any books on Africa, she’d have surely read and re-read them, too, but the subject was of no interest to the Turners.
“I can read some recipes and such,” she told Bronson. The other house slaves knew she could read that much, and admitting it meant he’d be less likely to catch her lie.
“Hm,” He seemed disappointed. “I suppose I am the victim of wishful thinking, as ever. The African mind is not suited to higher thought processes, but I do miss having helpers who can read things for themselves.”
This time, the peg leg she wielded in her mind went straight through his eye and out the back of his skull.
Instead, she said, “I will do my best despite my mental deficiencies, sir.”
At that, his eyes narrowed a bit and his eyebrows went up, but she kept her face carefully neutral and his moment of suspicion that she was being sarcastic apparently passed. He took one of the padded canvas coats and one set of the brass goggles from the rack and handed them to her.
“Put these on. There are gloves in the pockets of the coat; put them on, too. Button it up to your neck; you’ll want the protection from the cold.”
She did as he asked. The gloves she found were made of a thinner waxed canvas and had leather palms and fingertips like Mrs. Turner’s gardening gloves. Everything was several sizes too big for her, but she was able to cinch the strap on the goggles down over her head scarf so that the heavy leaded glass lenses stayed in place over her eyes.
Bronson reached for the bronze knob of the door leading into what had to be the main laboratory and paused, giving her a sharp look. “You are about to embark on a most noble endeavor. It’s entirely possible—and, if you fail to obey me, highly likely—that you shall lose your life in this room. But know that you are doing it for the greater good of mankind.”
Despite the disdain he seemed to have for her, there was a showman’s gleam in his eye. He craved an audience, Mariette realized. And if she were careful in her questions, she could use his eagerness to good advantage.
“What will we be doing, sir? Is it something to help Johnny Turner?”
“He will be helped, yes, but my research will do far more.”
Bronson opened the door into the laboratory. There was a strange burnt smell like the air after lightning struck a tree. The first thing Mariette saw was a pair of huge round glass tanks conjoined by a glass box with leather-covered portholes. Each of the round tanks was seamed with riveted brass strips and had enormous gleaming coils of copper wire at the top and bottom.
In the tank to her left, a strange, pulsing mass floated mid-air between the coils. It writhed bonelessly like a living thing. One moment it seemed black as tar, the next red as the setting sun, the next white as the moon. Even though it gave off no strong light, looking directly at it made her eyes ache, and she felt the exposed skin on her face grow warm as if she were standing beneath the noonday sun despite the cold of the room.
“What is that?” Mariette squinted away from the tanks and finally noticed the wall of brass instrument panels and racks of wooden tongs and blown glass bubbles. Thick rubber-coated cables ran from the copper coils to sockets in the base of the panels.
“Achronic aether,” Bronson replied proudly. His breath fogged away from him as if he were not a man but a dragon exhaling smoke. “Others have postulated its existence; I am the first to distill it and contain it. And soon, I shall be the only man able to control it.”
“W-what does it do?” Her teeth were starting to chatter, whether from fear or physical chill she couldn’t tell.
“At the moment, it strips heat from air, life from flesh, and sanity from minds,” he replied. “But once it is properly tamed, it shall make me master of both time and space.”
She stared at the blob again despite her discomfort, and she felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck beneath her stiff canvas collar. “How?”
“You’re beholding a fundamental solvent of the universe. We think of time and distances as fixed, linear. Trinidad is 60 leagues away; even if you took to the skies in a dirigible, you still have to travel the distance. Christmas is seven months away, and the faithful must suffer through every day between now and then. But with a stabilized crystal of achronic aether, a man of intelligence can escape the mundane bonds of time and distance and go when and where he wishes.”
Mariette blinked, thinking of Scrooge and his glimpse of the future in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. “He could go where and when…and change his fate?”
“Of course!” Bronson’s laugh was equal parts delight and scorn. “There’s no profit in merely being an observer! The possessor of the crystal could go to the future to discover wonders not yet invented…or go into the past and change his own starting fortunes entirely. The possibilities are limitless! But, as per my agreement with your owner, my first proof-of-concept will be to go back in time to convince Johnny Turner to stay here in Barbados instead of joining the British Navy.”
Her stomach buzzed as if she, too, had been hooked up to the electrical current from the great steam engine laboring outside. The achronic aether pulsed emerald inside its magnetic glass cage. No science could prove it, but she was certain it was eyelessly observing her.
“How many assistants have you had, sir?”
“Oh, seventy or eighty…I’ve rather lost count.” He paused. “Ours is a world of hundreds of millions of people. One might believe that an individual can have no possible consequence in the swarming sea of humanity, but history has proved otherwise over and over. Imagine that the great Leonardo da Vinci had left no heirs…would the world now have clockwork men and flying machines? He mattered; and soon, I shall matter even more.”
* * * *
Day after day, Mariette took the painful hike up the hill to the laboratory, where she did exactly what Bronson told her to do. It was an endless, nerve-wracking repetition of getting a pair of wooden tongs and a round flask, using the glove box to coax a bit of the aether from the first chamber into the glass, and then quickly transferring the aether-laden flask into the second chamber. Once she’d gotten it into that second chamber, she had to hold it perfectly still as Bronson worked his control panel to increase the magnetic fields to try to crush the aether into a crystalline configuration.
If the magnetic field ever failed, the aether would eat through the side of the glass and then through the tongs, and then the substance would behave as if she had dropped it. And if she ever dropped it, one of two immediately fatal things were likely to occur. The aether might explode into a fine black mist that would latch onto the nearest source of heat and moisture: her. And it would freeze her entire body solid before it dissipated back into the cracks of the universe. The second thing was that the aether might stay intact, but would ring like the very bell of doom, vibrating at a frequency guaranteed to drive most people insane if they were close by, and perhaps turn their brains to soup if they were quite near. Bronson had designed the room so that his seat at the instrument panel was a safe distance away.
Mariette did not drop the glass. Every day, she silently prayed to the Christian God and the forbidden Obeah spirits alike that Bronson would keep the magnetic field working. And when he wasn’t looking, she strained her eyes to glimpse his notes and try to figure out what he intended to do once he had his crystal. But she gained no useful clues from his scribbles and equations.
At the end of each session, Mariette’s shoulders, hands, leg and eyes ached, and her face was as dark as if she’d worked the entire time in the fields. She fell into an exhausted slumber and dreamed of strange worlds far beyond the Earth. She got Sunday afternoons off, as did all of Mr. Turner’s slaves after they’d attended church and dutifully listened to the white preacher’s sermons, but she found it harder and harder to make small talk with the others. Just as each day she and Bronson drew minutely closer to getting the aether to conform, each day she felt as though her mind was being forced open and taken away into a dimension of probability and causality. Even the Crop Over celebration, which she’d looked forward to every year since she was a small child, couldn’t bring her drifting mind back to shore.
But one day in November, Mariette was grimly clutching the tongs as she tried to keep the flask-bound aether steady in the second chamber. Bronson was trying the 316th new magnetic bombardment pattern he’d designed since Zeke ordered her to the laboratory; she had counted them all. Suddenly the aether crackled like hot molasses candy dropping into ice water. In a blink it had collapsed into a perfect, iridescent tetragon that rang like a silver bell.
And in that moment, she nearly dropped it in surprise and wonder, but she held fast at the last minute.
“Sir, sir, come quick!” Mariette had no faith that the aether would be stable and hold its shape for more than a few seconds.
She heard the clatter of Bronson knocking over the tongs rack in his haste to join her.
“Bring it forth!” he demanded.
“But it—”
“Bring it forth!”
Mariette took a deep breath and pulled the flask out of the chamber through the glove box porthole. Once released from the magnetic field, the bean-sized crystal clinked to the bottom of the glass. For one terrible moment, she was certain it was about to explode or eat through the flask, but it glittered perfect and still. Stable.
“Hold it up to the light!” Bronson wore the ecstatic expression of an atheist who had finally found God.
She carried the flask over to a nearby lamp so that Bronson could examine it more closely. Her mind churned. She’d spent so much time in the laboratory that she wanted very badly to see if the crystal worked as Bronson predicted…but she could not forget the terrible fates he wished on people like her. And he’d never revealed how it was that he intended to actually use the crystal. Even his notes had shed no light on that part of his plan. Should she wait and see? Should she fling the crystal against the wall to destroy it and probably herself and Bronson, too?
To her profound surprise, Bronson snatched the flask out of the tongs with his bare hands.
Bronson’s eye grew wide with wonder, as if he saw something miraculous in the far distance. “It’s…”
But then his body jerked as if he’d been struck and his eyes went dull, unresponsive. His knees buckled and the flask slipped from his lifeless fingers.
Mariette lunged forward to catch the flask in her gloved hands before it could shatter on the hard wooden floor.
The moment the glass-clad crystal settled in the palm of her gloved hand, the laboratory seemed to fall away and she felt as though she were floating in the vast, cold darkness amongst the stars.
“I have been summoned.” The voice was all around her. “What do you wish? Choose.”
“Who are you?” she whispered, terrified.
“Ylem.”
Suddenly, the vast wave of all the possibilities in the entire universe crashed down around her. She could go to any time, any world, any dimension, anywhere. The capacity of her mind expanded as fast as light, but it could not keep up with the infinity of possibility in the universe.
“Choose,” Ylem demanded. “I have been summoned, and you must choose.”
The impossibility of choice in the face of infinity threatened to burn her mind down like a blade of grass caught in a supernova.
But nonetheless, she chose: “I don’t want to be a slave. I don’t want to have been a slave. I don’t want any human being to have suffered as we have.”
“You have chosen. Now, make it so.”
The lines of history and probability and causality opened before her mind like a vast treasure map, and she raced backward through the ages, an Angel of Death for some, a guardian ghost to others. To kill, she had to but brush her spectral hand through a ribcage to stop a heart. To save a dying infant, she had to but picture healthy lungs or a full belly and it was so. But the more greed and evil she erased, the more there seemed to be. Slavery was intertwined with war and conquest so deeply that it was impossible to separate the two. And the wars seemed to go back forever and ever.
After what seemed like an aeon of saving and slaying, she found herself upon a sun-bleached veldt. A family of dark, slender, slightly-built apes clung to each other, keening softly as a gang of tall, burly apes from a different tribe surrounded them, hooting in victory and brandishing sharpened sticks.
She saw into the minds of the big apes. They would slay all the small males and roast them over the fire they had recently learned to capture from lightning strikes. But they might leave some of the small females alive as breeding slaves. These big apes delighted in killing and taking territory, reveled in the misery of the others they drove before them.
And she saw the minds of the small ones. They, too, had learned to use fire to harden clay for pots and beads and to boil the grains they foraged. The small ones delighted in making love and singing and crafting and only killed when they could find no plants or grubs to eat.
Mariette made her choice.
“It is accomplished,” Ylem said when she stopped the heart of the last big ape.
For a moment, Mariette found herself back in the lab, staring down at the crystal in the flask in her gloved hands as Bronson lay dead at her feet.
And then the crystal evaporated and the laboratory melted away.
Mariette—no, her name was Kmbana of the Green—stood on the deck of a ship floating above the clouds, staring down into empty hands. Hands that were brown and quite narrow and which bore short red fur. Completely familiar and yet utterly alien.
“Are you all right?” trilled her sister Nmbena in a language so far from English that she could not compare the two, but she knew it just as well.
Kmbana looked up at her sister’s earnest amber eyes and excitable whiskers and made herself smile. “Yes. I’m fine. Just daydreaming.”
Her mind now held two completely different memories: her life as the slave Mariette, and her new life as Kmbana, and her brain reeled trying to reconcile it all.
“Do you like the new leg?” her sister asked.
“Oh yes,” Kmbana replied reflexively as she suddenly remembered that here, in this new now, she’d lost her leg falling over the edge of an airship when she was just a child. “It’s lovely.”
And it was lovely, she realized. It was a gorgeous work of wood and brass made to match her flesh leg, and inside it had clever tiny motors and clockworks to allow her to move the metal foot like a real one.
“It’s amazing,” Kmbana added.
“Do you think you would like to take a walk along the seashore? The shipmothers are talking about stopping at the island below us.”
Her sister pointed over the railing at a teardrop-shaped island, and Kmbana gave a start when she recognized it from the shape she’d once seen on maps: Barbados! She breathed in the smells of rich soil and seaweed. But here it was the tip of a nameless archipelago. She tried to make out the rise where the plantation would have been, but it was all forest.
She wanted to laugh with joy at the wonders of this peaceful new world, but she also wanted to weep for the good she’d inadvertently erased along with the bad. She and her sister and the other millions of souls upon the planet were people, certainly, but none human as she understood humanity. There had never been a British Navy, nor a Johnny Turner to be twisted by it. But there also had never been a Dickens, nor a da Vinci, nor a Shakespeare. There had been others just as brilliant—the Great Mothers they learned about in school—and people had accomplished immortal works of art and invention in the absence of war. But they were not the same.
It made her profoundly sad to know that she would never read The Tempest again.
Apparently her expression clouded, because her sister added, “I think we might be the first to visit this island. We might get to name things we find! Wouldn’t you like that?”
Kmbana smiled. “Yes, I’d like that.”