Chapter 89 — The Avalanche
The Curve of Time, Chapter 89 —— The Avalanche, in which Sienna bursts Saskia’s bubble about the new timeline.
Followed by a confession about how little wiggle room I’ve currently got writing.
Listen to full episode :
— 89 —
The Avalanche
Saskia riffled through Mica’s chest of drawers in search of comfy T-shirts for herself and her twin. Mica had told them that Sienna and Wassily were there, and absconded back to the kitchen.
“The Sienna out there”——Native Saskia waved towards Mica’s kitchen——“she’s the one you stopped from attending the meditation retreat in your timeline, right?”
Saskia nodded. “Except that she’s actually the Sienna in your timeline. And somehow I’m in your timeline.” As she confirmed her status as an interloper, it dawned on Saskia that the specific context arguably made her more rightly deserving of Mica. It was her intervention, after all, that saved this timeline from spiraling into chaos.
She threw her double an Earth Day Tee and they both slipped tops on over jogging pants.
“C’mon, we should save Mica,” Saskia said as she led their way into the hallway.
“What made your timeline so bad?” her double asked.
But before Saskia could answer, Sienna poked her head out from the kitchen and everyone froze, their eyes shifting from one to another. Sienna squinted one eye closed as she appraised the two Saskia’s.
To Saskia, Sienna was the first pebble dislodged from the rock wall that was the world, and she wondered if Sienna’s self duplication up the coast had further loosened the surrounding debris?
Beside her, Saskia’s Earth Day twin swung her index finger in Saskia’s direction. “She’s the one who intervened before you got to the retreat,” she said, as if that absolved herself of any onus for the predicament they were in. “I haven’t seen you since just after our first date with Mica.”
Sienna appraised her interloping double. “You stayed in this timeline?”
“I can’t exactly pick and choose timelines,” Saskia pushed back. “Why wouldn’t I, anyway?”
“You didn’t want to take a run at another intervention?”
Saskia glanced at this timeline’s version of herself, who shrugged her shoulders as they entered the kitchen. She then turned to Mica, who was brewing additional chais.
Mica met her eyes, before scanning their posse. “I think everyone sort of knows everyone else.”
Saskia turned back to Sienna, “I see you found Wassily.”
Wassily raised his hand and gave a little wave. “Hi Saskia.” And then turning to the second Saskia: “Saskia.”
“I guess you were expecting at least one of us——so, what’s so surprising about two of us?” Saskia gave a little shake of her head. “Right?”
“The more, the merrier.”
Saskia turned back to Sienna. “This timeline can’t be that bad. You’ve stayed.”
“Yeah, but you were freaked out when six people learnt to slip in time. Seems like, in your timeline, it was more like I dampened the spread.”
“There are more here?”
“Oh, yeah,” Sienna nodded her head emphatically.
Was the loose rock, that Sienna was, somehow cloning time travelers?
“Wait? What? ...Who else, here, can slip in time?” Saskia sensed a crumbling fissure in the cliff face of the world.
To her surprise, it was Mica who answered: “Charles Belfry, for one.”
“From the Santa Cruz meditation retreat?” Saskia asked.
Mica eyebrows shot up. “I guess our worlds aren’t so different.”
“You don’t need to be a reporter to know, though,” Sienna added.
“I suspect Gary Holcomb learnt too,” Mica continued, “he’s also from the retreat. And missing. But they’re not nearly the only ones. According to a much older Charles, thousands of people will soon be able to slip in time.”
This timeline’s native Saskia turned to her twin. “But, you’ve seen the future. How is this a surprise?”
“Are you sure that the only thing you changed was stopping me from attending the retreat?” Sienna asked, an air of accusation in her question.
Saskia’s head was spinning. The avalanche was bringing down scree, and, with it, erosion accelerating, like a runaway atomic reaction, until it cut further and further back into the mountain. “I just returned to the present,” she objected. “But you, you——”
“I’ve never taught anyone.”
“What if it wasn’t her?” Native Saskia speculated. “What if the problem was her no-showing?”
“There’s a Youtube livestream from Amara’s retreat,” Mica offered, as she pulled out her phone. “I found it after visiting Charles.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted that,” Sienna noted. “Not if I’d been there——not unnecessarily getting caught on camera for all the world to see.”
“But if Sienna wasn’t there,” Wassily seemed perplexed, “and the retreat was the amplification event, then who was the seed? Amara?”
Saskia shook her head at Wassily. “No. No, the only person that we encountered”——Saskia looked at Sienna——“Not you.” She turned to Native Saskia. “Us.” And then, looking back at Sienna continued: “Our lives split before Saskia and I met Zeno. And, the only person we encountered before the meditation retreat, was Zeno.” Saskia raised her eyebrows at Sienna: “You didn’t meet anyone from the meditation retreat, did you?”
“I never made it to the retreat!” Sienna reiterated. “Though, we all met Amara——remember?——in Berkeley, maybe a decade ago.”
“Sure,” Saskia admitted, even as she waved her hand dismissively. “Let’s table Amara, though——if it were him, then why now? More importantly, how could Zeno have known how to slip in time?”
“Did you teach him?” It was Wassily who asked the obvious. “Maybe inadvertently?”
Native Saskia shrugged complete bafflement. “Not that I’m aware of.”
“And yet we still don’t know how we learnt to slip in time, back in the beginning.” Sienna turned to Saskia again as she spoke. “And the only other person who was there when we all learnt was you.”
“I . . . ” Saskia started, but was unsure how to continue.
Mica turned to both Saskias: “What did you do when you went back to your first slip in time? Anything that was similar to when you went back to see Zeno?”
“We——” again Saskia started to reply, only this time she stopped because she did see something: a similarity. “We slowed time down when we were really close——if a meditative state matters——it must have been Zeno.”
Saskia explained her earlier suspicion that a meditative state might be the conduit to learning; and that if that was the case, then they might have inadvertently taught Zeno, back when they first encountered him.
“It’s like a plant sensing another plant flowering,” Mica found a literary analogy, “suddenly it flowers itself . . . but you have to be in a primed state, like spring; in this case: a meditative state.”
Wassily looked at the phone in Mica’s hand. “Like the people watching Amara’s livestream?”
“One of us needs to go back and talk ourselves out of going to Dallas,” Saskia summized, adding for Mica: “It didn’t stop the oil spill, anyway.”
Mica wiped her forehead with her hand and glanced at Sienna. “What about the other you’s from the bathroom at Cleo’s?”
“Oh, wait.” Saskia suddenly saw Mica’s epiphany. “If we accidentally taught Zeno, then what’s to say we didn’t teach ourselves to slip in time? Simply slipping back and watching ourselves dozing that first afternoon. In our backyard.”
Mica’s eyes widened. “Never mind the bathroom at our first date, our whole world depends on a closed causal loop. And now, now you have to pincer everything off,” she suggested the definitive time travel solution. “Go back, and don’t teach yourself. Excise a closed loop of reality and keep the world clean of time travelers?”
Sienna looked at the Saskias. “You didn’t even realize you were doing it.” And, suddenly her eyes widened. “And it wasn’t me!”
Was Saskia’s initial foray into slipping in time actually the minor rivulet that cut a narrow channel? Was she the crucial precursor to the avalanche? The one responsible for the world collapsing back in on itself, with time travelers proliferating everywhere. Most importantly, could she really put the time travel genie back in the bottle?
That was chapter 89, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it … because it’s the end of the line!
OK, so not the end of the line. It would be weird if my conception of The Curve of Time was to end here. I mean things are wonderfully chaotic, which is what we want as we reach the climax, but the story can’t possible finish here. And, no, it doesn’t. It’s just that my lead has evaporated.
Not only is next week’s chapter not yet written, the next half dozen or so chapters have a collection of narrative orphans. Specifically, every time I’ve had an idea that didn’t quite fit into a chapter that I wrote earlier, I just tossed it later in the book. And now, now the consequences of my willy nilly lackadaisical approach are coming home to roost.
In fairness to me——or maybe this is just my own defense; you be the judge——my notes for the upcoming chapter include many elements that have tickled me in the past, but just didn’t quite fit. Unfortunately, there really aren’t many more future chapters in which to toss these ideas. Moreover, at this point we should be sprinting to the finish line!
So, what do to?
Well, the next half dozen chapters really need to be wrangled into about three chapters; and in doing so, many precious darlings will need to be tossed overboard. To compound matters, my next couple of weeks include a trip to my youngest’s university for parents’ weekend and a visit here from my oldest friend in mathematics. Which is to say I’m faced with a daunting task, and decidedly distracted.
In short, there is a risk that over the next few weeks there might come a point when I need to slip in time myself, or, more concretely, skip a week of the podcast. I’m curious how many of you are actually listening to these episodes as they drop (send me a note, if that’s you!). I’m consoling myself that for the other 99% of you who are bingeing, I doubt you’ll even notice the gap … unless, of course, I decide to drop an episode that is pure commentary.
For now, thinking about the commentary, has given me an idea for the extra content that I can’t quite shoe-horn into the main text: bonus behind the scenes snippets. Whatever else happens, you can expect some of that in the weeks to come.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
