Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the front of Malik's big van on the grassy roadside, waiting for Madame Alberta to come back and tell them where they were going. Madame Alberta supposedly knew where they could dig up some improperly buried spent uranium from the power plant, and the back of the van was full of pretty good safety gear that Madame Alberta had scared up for them. The faceplates of the suits glared up at Lydia from their uncomfortable resting place. The three of them were psyching themselves up to go and possibly irradiate the shit out of themselves.
    Worth it, if the thing they were helping to build in Madame Alberta's laundry room was a real time machine and not just another figment.
    "You guys never even asked," Lydia said around one in the morning, when they were all starting to wonder if Madame Alberta was going to show up. "I mean, about me, and why I was in that twelve-step group before the Time Travel Club meetings. You don't know anything about me, or what I've done."
    "We know all about you," Malik said. "You're a pirate."
    "You do extreme solar-sail sports in the future," Jerboa added. "What else is there to know?"
    "But," Lydia said. "I could be a criminal. I might have killed someone. I could be as bad as that astral projection guy."
    "Lydia," Malik put one hand on her shoulder, like super gently. "We know you."
    Nobody spoke for a while. Every few minutes, Malik turned on the engine so they could get some heat, and the silence between engine starts was deeper than ordinary silence.
    "I had blackouts," Lydia said. "Like, a lot of blackouts. I would lose hours at a time, no clue where I'd been or how I'd gotten here. I would just be in the middle of talking to people, or behind the wheel of a car in the middle of nowhere, with no clue. I worked at this high-powered sales office, we obliterated our targets. And everybody drank all the time. Pitchers of beer, of martinis, of margaritas. The pitcher was like the emblem of our solidarity. You couldn't turn the pitcher away, it would be like spitting on the team. We made so much money. And I had this girlfriend, Sara, with this amazing red hair, who I couldn't even talk to when we were sober. We would just lie in bed naked, with a bottle of tequila propped up between us. I knew it was just a matter of time before I did something really unforgivable during one of those blackouts. Especially after Sara decided to move out."
    "So what happened?" Jerboa said.
    "In the end, it wasn't anything I did during a blackout that caused everything to implode," Lydia said. "It was what I did to keep myself from ever having another blackout. I got to work early one day, and I just lit a bonfire in the fancy conference room. And I threw all the contents of the company's wet bar into it."
    Once again, nobody talked for a while. Malik turned the engine on and off a couple of times, which made it about seven minutes of silence. They were parked by the side of the road, and every once in a while a car simmered past.
    "I think that's what makes us such good time travelers, actually." Jerboa's voice cracked a little bit, and Lydia was surprised to see the outlines of tears on that small brown face, in the light of a distant highway detour sign. "We are very experienced at being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and at doing whatever it takes to get ourselves to the right place, and the right time."
    Lydia put her arm around Jerboa, who was sitting in the middle of the front seat, and Jerboa leaned into Lydia's shoulder so just a trace of moisture landed on Lydia's neck.
    "You wouldn't believe the places I've had to escape from in the middle of the night," Jerboa said. "The people who tried to fix my, my... irregularities. You wouldn't believe the methods that have been tried. People can justify almost anything, if their perspective is limited enough."
    Malik wrapped his hand on Jerboa's back, so it was like all three of them were embracing. "We've all had our hearts broken, I guess," he said. "I was a