Time Past by Maxine McArthur

Florence, naming a figure about half of the tiny amount I received from the mechanic. By now I knew that illegal immigrants couldn’t hope to be paid fair wages for any job. But I saw the computer on the desk and calculated that the drop in pay would be tolerable if I didn’t have to spend most of it at the café. And I could keep giving rent to Grace.
    Florence said she’d “discuss” my application with Abdul. When I went back the next day, she said I’d got the job. Which was, I found out, a combination of mechanic, electrician, and computer repairperson.
    None of which would come in handy when I got back and found myself ex-head of station, which would happen if Earth was annoyed at the way I’d borrowed funds to complete the
Calypso II
project, then thoughtlessly become lost in the past. If the jump point maintained its correspondence of ninety-nine years between 2023 and my own time of 2122.
    I swung my legs over the side of the bed, being careful to first whack the ground with the short stick I kept handy for that purpose. Rats usually stayed around the outside garbage heaps where food was freely available, but I’d put my bare foot on a large cockroach once and the memory still made me shudder.
    The dirt felt cool and gritty under my toes as I felt around for my sandals. Bluish white light snuck through cracks in one side, from the floodlights across the little river, where a clinical waste incinerator ran twenty-four hours, seven days a week. On the door side of the tent, yellow light would grow brighter, then fade again as somebody carried a lantern or torch along the track.
    I reached for the jug and poured a glass of water. Sometimes it calmed the wheezing from the asthma attack. The water tasted stale and sour, although it was bought, filtered stuff. Even Jocasta’s recycled water tasted better than this.
    I finished sipping and leaned forward with my head resting on my folded arms on the crate table. A change of posture sometimes helped with the wheezing, too.
    During the day I could think about telescopes and contacting the Invidi, and all the minutiae of daily life. I’d never imagined all the small, dreary tasks that had to be done to function at even this century’s standard. All these
things,
out to get me. Like the viruses, lining up to get past my immune system. I wasn’t used to taking care of anything but my job. On Jocasta, food preparation, cleaning, and waste disposal was done for us, silently and mostly efficiently.
    But now, in the hours of darkness and silence here on Earth—unlike on the space station, where we have night-shift workers, and aliens who work their day shift at night, and the whole complex machinery of life support and recycling hums on in the background—in the hours when everything shuts down except the incinerator, my memories of the past creep up on me. My past, but this world’s future.
    I can see the chain of events that led to my being stuck here in the past quite clearly. A line of dominoes, set up in some pattern only the Invidi can understand. Every night in the out-town I sit wheezing in the dark and line them all up in my mind. Every night I give one of them a push, and watch as the line falls.
    First—although, depending on which domino I push, it might not be first—there was the Abelar Treaty. Named after the star system within which Jocasta is situated, the Abelar Treaty was designed by me and my advisers on Jo-casta and was signed by two alien races and myself, as governor of the Abelar system and therefore representative of the Confederacy. This was in early 2121. The treaty made the two alien races, the Seouras and the Danadan, co-monitors of each other’s affairs within the Abelar system, which hopefully would stop their fighting with each other and destroying the neighborhood.
    The Abelar Treaty was significant because when a different group of Seouras arrived several months later, we thought they also recognized the treaty. But these Seouras