"This Is How You Lose the Time War"

[fiefoe]

Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone wrote a fanciful epistolary novel between two foes in the titular war. The most fun part is perhaps finding out what forms the letters took in each round. I could do without the grand romantic gestures at the end, but the push-and-pull before that was gorgeous.

• That was fun, she thinks, but the thought sours in the framing. It was clean, at least. Climb up time’s threads into the past and make sure no one survives this battle to muddle the futures her Agency’s arranged—the futures in which her Agency rules, in which Red herself is possible.
• But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time.
• So she wanders the charnel field of victory and seeks the seeds of her defeat.
• Red likes to feel. It is a fetish. Now she feels fear. And eagerness.
• The ash becomes a piece of paper, with sapphire ink in a viny hand at the top. <> This letter was meant to be read once, then destroyed.
• -- I must tell you it gives me great pleasure to think of you reading these words in licks and whorls of flame, your eyes unable to work backwards, unable to keep the letters on a page; instead you must absorb them, admit them into your memory. In order to recall them you must seek my presence in your thoughts, tangled among them like sunlight in water. In order to report my words to your superiors you must admit yourself already infiltrated, another casualty of this most unfortunate day.
• She savours her victories in retrospect, between missions, recalls them only while travelling (upthread into the stable past or downthread into the fraying future) as one recalls beloved lines of poetry. She combs or snarls the strands of time’s braid with the finesse or brutality required of her, and leaves.
• -- Even we who fight wars through time forget the value of a word in the right moment, a rattle in the right car engine, a nail in the right horseshoe . . . It’s so easy to crush a planet that you may overlook the value of a whisper to a snowbank.
• -- Not the life you would have wanted for him, perhaps—unhappy but useful to posterity, harbouring the vulnerable, dimpling the future’s punch cards one new life at a time. Instead of building a hermitage, he fell in love! Made glorious music with his fellow, travelled widely, drew tears from an emperor, melted her hard heart, bumped history out of one groove and into another. Strand 22 crosses Strand 56, if I’m not mistaken,
• -- may causality forbid Commandant ever dispatch me to one of your viny-hivey elfworlds, profusely floral, all arcing elder trees, neural pollen, bees gathering memories from eyes and tongue, honey libraries dripping knowledge from the comb.
• -- if you succeeded, if you stole the physical object on whose slow quantum decomposition this strand’s random-number generators depend, if that triggered a cryptographic crisis, if that crisis led people to distrust their food printers, if hungry masses rioted, if riots fed this glitter to the fires of war, we’d have to start again—cannibalizing other strands, likely from your braid.
• The letter begins in the tree’s heart. Rings, thicker here and thinner there, form symbols in an alphabet no one present knows but Red. The words are small, sometimes smudged, but still: ten years per line of text, and many lines. Mapping roots, depositing or draining nutrients year by year, the message must have taken a century to craft.
• -- It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I. The physics of us. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. My viny-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia. We both know it’s nothing so simple, any more than a letter’s reply is its opposite.
• Seven strands tangle on the collapse or survival of this fishery—insignificant to some eyes, everything to others. Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.
• Blue is faster. The beater’s skull breaks like an egg beneath her club. She drops into a crouch beside it to inspect the pelt. <> The sight hits her like a hakapik. There, in the ice-rimed fur, mottled and marked as hand-pulped paper, spots and speckles resolve into a word she can read: “Blue.”
• Buried in the depths of glistening viscera is a dry piece of cod, undigested, scratched and grooved with language.
• -- I consulted the literature on scents and wax seals, as you suggested. It’s all a bit counterintuitive, this business of communication through base matter. Closing a letter—a physical object without even a ghost in the cloud, all that data on one frail piece of paper—with an even more malleable substance, bearing, of all things, an ideographic signature!
• -- There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.
• -- But I enjoy eating these days. More of us do than care to admit it publicly. I revel in it, as one only revels in pursuits one does not need.
• The shifting colors form words that last mere moments, in handwriting now familiar. As the lava flows, those words change.
• -- I assure you that cryptography pales in comparison; imagine a cipher made up of interlocking moods shifting in response to environmental stimuli.
• -- Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? <> Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.
• London Next—the same day, month, year, but one strand over—is the kind of London other Londons dream: sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story requires it, all meat pies and monarchy.
• Instead, she stirs the spoon, empty, into the tea, and watches as the leaves unclump, swirl, spindle into letters. Each rotation is slow, and she marks paragraph breaks with small sips; every sip undoes the letters until she swirls them into meaning again.
• -- I try not to think of you the same way twice. Thinking builds patterns in the brain, and those patterns can be read by one sufficiently determined, and Commandant, sometimes, is sufficiently determined—I think you’d like her. So I change your shape in my thoughts. It’s amazing how much blue there is in the world, if you look.
• She seeds the Strand 9 Amazon Basin with defanged versions of European superbugs ten centuries before first contact, and when conquistadors arrive, they face locals by the millions, strong, thriving communities that won’t perish by mere contact with the world across the waves.
• -- But Garden dislikes words. Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt. I can hide in words so long as I scatter them through my body; to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room.
• She eats the first three seeds one by one. She should be sitting beneath a baobab tree, but she slumps under a buckeye instead, surrounded by spiked shells. <> As each letter unfolds inside her mind, she frames it in the palace of her memory. She webs words to cobalt and lapis, she weds them to the robes of Mary in San Marco frescoes, to paint on porcelain, to the color inside a glacier crack. She will not let her go.
• -- PS. I love writing in aftertaste.
• -- though I don’t know their names like you know them, I have seen small bright singers puff before they trill. That’s how I feel. I sing myself out to you, and my talons clutch the branch, and I am wrung out until your next letter gives me breath, fills me to bursting.
• -- Myth and legend give way to history, which gives way again to myth, like curtains parting and meeting again on either side of a performance. Halla begins in Mitchison’s Norse myths outside of book-time, and by the end has been absorbed—embedded, perhaps—into the myths of those she travelled with.
• -- Sometimes when you write, you say things I stopped myself from saying. I wanted to say, I want to make you tea to drink, but didn’t, and you wrote to me of doing so; I wanted to say, your letter lives inside me in the most literal way possible, but didn’t, and you wrote to me of structures and events.
• -- Like your victory, love spreads back through time. It claims our earliest association, our battles and losses. Assassinations become assignations.
• -- The needle sinks and spirals through its grooves. I spurt anachronisms as I wind down. It’s good to feel this in common with the universe, somehow. I never died but once—that once I told you of—and it was quite a different thing. Strange how being erased can bring one in line with a greater narrative.
• But they have sprinkled bits of themselves through time. Ink and ingenuity, flakes of skin on paper, bits of pollen, blood, oil, down, a goose’s heart.
• They question her in silk, and she answers each challenge with memories of Blue. Blue braiding grasses. Blue taking tea. Blue, hair shorn, come to steal from God. Blue with club raised, Blue with razor, Blue birthing futures. <> The spiders mark her with their fangs, which is a dangerous way to give directions. But though the knowledge burns through her veins, the woman Red’s become does not die.
• -- When you said you wouldn’t write again, when you said—that is the only letter of yours I’ve wanted to obliterate from myself. If I’m honest, that’s part of why I took the bait. To be unmade, that last written over—to be destroyed by you was easier, truly, than living with what you proposed.