“That depends on what you mean by ‘it all.’”
“You wanted to extend Jane Austen’s life. You thought I would be the person crazy enough to disregard the mission directives and do it. And you knew this would result in . . . things being different.” Three days back, I was still unraveling all the ways things were different, aside from my mother being dead and Liam married. They were numerous.
“Crazy is a harsh term, Dr. Katzman. You did what needed to be done. For which I am most grateful.”
I was not sure what to say to this. “So was it Tom?” I demanded at last. “The climbing boy? Was that what did it? Because things were already starting to be different, even before I had diagnosed Jane’s ailment. There was the choking incident, and Wilberforce—what about Wilberforce? I don’t see how it all connects.”
“There is a high probability that it was Tom. That this act of yours somehow set other things into motion.”
“But how could you know that I would do that? Or that he would happen along?”
“I don’t think you understand. We are talking here of probability fields. Nothing is known. Nothing is absolute. Those are ideas for children; they are fairy tales.” She looked at me with what might have been pity. “You will have a hard time here, I see, unless you get rectified. I advise you do it soon, once the debriefing ends.”
“But I will forget everything about Jane Austen, in that case.” And Liam, I did not add.
“If I had been able to meet her, I wouldn’t want to forget that either.” She looked out into the garden again. “But then, millions of people live their lives happily, never having met Jane Austen. They enjoy her work; they imagine what she might have been like.”
Her implication, I supposed, was that I should content myself with being like those people. “But I can’t—” I began, and stopped, not sure what I wanted to say.
“It would be hard, though, to forget what I had done,” she continued. “If I were you, that would be hardest. The world will never understand or thank you for the sacrifice you’ve made; you must therefore take pride in it yourself. To willingly give that up—to erase that memory and be as other people—it would take more than an ordinary amount of humility, wouldn’t it?”
THE FIRST THING I LEARNED ABOUT LIAM IN THIS WORLD WAS that he went by William. He’d been married to Sabina Markievicz, pharmaceutical heiress and noted art appraiser, for five years; the couple had two fox terriers but no children. He was something of a celebrity scholar: the author of several works of popular history and a stage actor as well. Fascinated, I watched clips of him, articulate and amusing on Sheridan, Brummell, Regency hygiene. I wondered if he’d been playing down his achievements before, but decided that could not be right. If he’d been, as I learned, the son of a technology executive from Manchester, or in a Shakespeare troupe in his twenties, he’d have said so. His biography was different here.
The more I learned, the harder it became to avoid concluding that in this version he had the success I suspected he’d always wanted, however modestly he might have disclaimed his ambition. My inability to imagine him in my neat white bed in Brooklyn had been prophetic, if not for the reasons I’d thought.
I turned away from the wall screen, sat down on my bed, and rested my head in my hands, feeling I’d made a terrible blunder. But where?
MY BIOGRAPHY WAS DIFFERENT TOO, THOUGH NOT AS MUCH AS HIS. In my session with Dr. Montana, I learned about the person she called alt-Rachel, that person sharing my name who’d traveled back in time with the goal of saving Jane Austen’s life. She’d never volunteered in Mongolia or Peru or Haiti, or trekked through the Andes, though she had had a string of unhappy relationships with men, and perhaps that is adventure of a sort. She was a physician, but an endocrinologist. How she’d ended up on the Jane Austen Project Team was a mystery to me; it certainly wasn’t for any proven audacity, though we did share a love of Jane Austen.
My mother, in my own version, had been a healthy sixty-seven-year-old. Here, she’d died fifteen years earlier, in an influenza pandemic. My father, still a handsome cardiologist, still an opera lover, had still died when I was twenty-eight. I still had no siblings.
“Your variance is high, as we suspected,” Dr. Montana said. “Seventy-five percent. I would advise rectification, but the choice is yours.” She paused. I sensed she felt sorry for me, but maybe that was just me feeling sorry for me; this variant of myself, in addition to being an orphan, seemed so boring. I tried to have more compassion for alt-Rachel: losing a parent so young had to do something to a person, to their sense of how random disaster stalked the earth and could strike at any time. I thought about how she’d gone bravely off into the past—just as I had—and was now presumably stranded in some alternate probability where she did not belong—just as I was. My ghostly twin, my unlived possible life.
“Can I decide later?” Rectification was the last thing I wanted, but I was reluctant to express my opinions openly. I was in an alien land, even more than in 1815; that at least I had studied ahead of time.
“Of course, within the three-month window.”
“So what determines it? How different a person’s life might be, when they come back?” I was thinking of Liam, but could not say his name. The hushed, awed way people spoke about him here had been amusing at first, then disconcerting; as if this William Finucane really were someone different from the Liam I’d known. I was starting to see what Eva Farmer meant about the past being a collective fiction. “Does it mean something, when a person’s biography is very different?”
“A question more for Eva Farmer than for me. But there are different theories. Some people are thought to be more . . . malleable, you might say, more fluid. A small change in early-life circumstances could send them in quite a different direction. Whereas others—it’s unscientific, to talk about destiny, but it can seem so. Like something meant to be.”
IN THE VERSION I HAD COME FROM, TIME TRAVEL WAS ONCE IN A lifetime, too dangerous psychologically to be repeated. Here, I was an employee of the Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics: I could participate in research, help others train for missions, or try out to go on another one myself. Did I want to stay on? I had no idea.
I had furlough of twelve weeks to recover; I could think ahead no more than that. Amid debriefing, report writing, and turning down requests for media interviews, I prepared to return to New York. Whether for a visit or to remain, I wasn’t sure yet, but I already sensed there was nowhere in this world I could call home.