Page 14 of Love and Other Paradoxes

“Right. Sorry,” he said graciously. “You were reciting the small print.”

“A lot of it’s about the target. That’s you,” she explained, wiggling her fingers at him. “Time travellers may not follow the target into any private premises, or beyond the radius of 0.5 miles of the wormhole. Time travellers may leave gifts for the target, but said gifts may not contain any text or media originating from the future. Time travellers may not interact with the target directly—”

“Sorry, just to check,” he interrupted her. “You agreed to these terms and conditions?”

“Obviously. Otherwise they wouldn’t have let me on the trip. But I ran away from the tour guide the first chance I got, and now I’m just trying to stay out of her way.”

“And the company—they haven’t sent out a search party? They’re okay with you just disappearing?”

“I don’t know if they’re okay with it. Honestly, I don’t care. That’s not the point. The point is...” She leaned across the table, her gaze locked on his. “They don’t want us getting anywhere near you. It’s like they’re trying to stop us doing anything that might change your future. But if the leaflet’s true, nothing can change your future. So why do they need us to agree to all that?”

He followed her logic. “So you think time travelcanchange the future, they’re just pretending it can’t?” She nodded. “But—that can’t be right. People would know if the future was changing. They’dnotice.”

“Would they?” She lifted her chin. “What if it was changing all the time, but our memories were changing too? No one would even realise it was happening.”

He felt a hallucinatory lurch at the thought. If she was right, his entire life could be being rewritten from moment to moment, his sense of a persistent self nothing but an illusion. And it was worse than that. His glorious future could dissolve at any second.

It wasn’t true. He couldn’t let it be true. He sat back, crossing his arms. “Nah.”

She looked affronted. “What do you mean, ‘nah’?”

“I mean, nah, I don’t buy it. There’s plenty of other reasons they might have those terms and conditions. Maybe it’s about respect.Maybe they just want to give me a wee bit of privacy. It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy theory.”

She choked out a laugh. “Conspiracy theory?”

“And no company would do that. Imagine, if time travel could really change the past and they knew it. They’d never take the risk. They could write their customers out of existence. They could writethemselvesout of existence. Flimsy terms and conditions aren’t going to be enough to protect against that.”

She made a soft, frustrated sound. “You’re sitting there with a book of poems you haven’t written yet, and you’re seriously trying to tell me time travel can’t change the past?”

His coffee was starting to get cold, but he didn’t care: he was too absorbed in their argument. “No, I get it. I had the same thought. But think about it. What if you were always meant to come back in time?” He leaned across the table, holding her gaze. “You’d always have dropped the book. I’d always have read it. It would always have been part of my story.”

She didn’t lean away. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying—maybe it doesn’t change the future. Maybe it creates it.” He laid his hand on the book. “Honestly, before, I never really believed all this stuff was possible. I wanted it—Jesus, Ireallywanted it—but did I actually think I could get there? Not in a million years. Now? I know I can. Because look. It happened.” She was watching him intently, but he didn’t register her expression; he was in full flow, as if he were in a supervision with his Director of Studies but it was going well for a change. “So the company line makes sense to me. And it’s not miles off from how some philosophers have thought about time travel. The past can’t change,” he finished triumphantly, “because any attempt to change it would always already have happened.”

Her face crumpled. She covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes filling with tears.

He reared back. “Jesus. Fuck, I’m sorry. Did I—What did I say?”

A tear spilled from her eye, and she dashed it away. “You know it all, don’t you? This was stupid. I should never have talked to you.” She got up, chair screeching across the floorboards.

His mind raced, trying to understand. She was here to change something: something so important she had almost jumped into a river to stop him from messing it up. “Esi, wait.”

She turned, red-eyed. He felt the trembling weight of the moment: what he said next could hold her here, or push her away. He made a wild, desperate guess. “You’re here to save someone.”

She closed her eyes. The tears spilled over as she nodded. He watched her carefully as she came back to the table. “Who?”

“My mum.” She sat down, scrubbing wildly at her eyes. “I told you I was a bomb crater, right? She was the bomb.”

He swallowed. “What happened?”

“Car accident. She was driving, and a truck sideswiped her. Wrong place, wrong time.” She looked down, picking at the backs of her hands. “I was eight. Old enough to understand she was gone, not old enough to handle it.”

He shifted in his seat. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Everyone’s sorry.” She rubbed her sleeve across her eyes. “My sisters, they were younger. After a while, they didn’t even remember her. I ended up being more of a mum to them, in the end. Well, me and my aunties. And my dad—he grieved, but his friends from church carried him through. Me—it broke me.” She looked up, and he felt for an instant the full force of her loss. “People throw that word around, but I mean it. When my mumdied, the person I was meant to be died too. And all that’s left is—this.” She made an angry gesture at herself.

He wanted to say something—that she shouldn’t talk about herself like that, that her mum would have wanted her to move on—but in the face of her grief, all his words sounded useless. “But—that’s got to still be in the future, right? The book’s from 2044. If that’s when you’re from, there’s no way you’re eight in the present.”

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