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

teacher, in one of those Teach For America-style programs. I thought we were all in this together, that we had a shared code. I thought we were altruists. Until they threw me under a bus."
    And it was then that Malik said the thing about wanting to stand outside history and see the gears grinding from a distance, all of the cruelty and all of the edifices that had been built on human remains. The true power wouldn't be changing history, or even seeing how it turned out, but just seeing the shape of the wheel.
    They sat for a good long time in silence again. The engine ticked a little. They stayed leaning into each other, as the faceplates watched.
    Lydia started to say something like, "I just want to hold on to this moment. Here, now, with the two of you. I don't care about whatever else, I just want this to last." But just as she started to speak, Madame Alberta tapped on the passenger-side window, right next to Lydia's head, and gestured at her car, which was parked in front of theirs. It was time to suit up, and go get some nuclear waste.
    Lydia didn't see Malik or Jerboa for a month or so after Madame Alberta told her weird story about Europe getting nuked. MJL Aerospace shuttered its offices, and Lydia saw the rocket picture in a dumpster as she drove to the Lucky Doubloon. She redoubled her commitment to going to a twelve-step meeting every goddamn day. She finally called her mom back, and went to a few bluegrass concerts.
    Lydia got the occasional panicked call from Normando, or even one of the other semi-regulars, wondering what happened to the club, but she just ignored it.
    Until one day Lydia was driving to work, on the day shift again, and she saw Jerboa walking on the side of the road. Jerboa kicked the shoulder of the road over and over, kicking dirt and rocks, not looking ahead. Hips and knees jerking almost out of their sockets. Inaudible curses spitting at the gravel.
    Lydia pulled over next to Jerboa and honked her horn a couple of times, then rolled down the window. "Come on, get in." She turned down the bluegrass on her stereo.
    Jerboa gave a gesture between a wave and a "go away."
    "Listen, I screwed up," Lydia said. "That aerospace thing was a really bad idea. It wasn't about the money, though, you have to believe me about that. I just wanted to give us a new project, so we wouldn't drift apart."
    "It's not your fault." Jerboa did not get in the truck. "I don't blame you."
    "Well, I blame myself. I was being selfish. I just didn't want you guys to run away. I was scared. But we need to figure out a way to turn the space travel back into time travel. We can't do that, unless we work together."
    "It's just not possible," Jerboa said. "For any amount of time displacement beyond a few hours, the variables get harder and harder to calculate. The other day, I did some calculations and figured out that if you traveled a hundred years into the future, you'd wind up around one-tenth of a light year away. That's just a back-of-the-envelope thing, based on our orbit around the Sun."
    "Okay, so one problem at a time." Lydia stopped her engine, gambling that it would restart. The bluegrass stopped mid-phrase. "We need to get some accurate measurements of exactly where stuff ends up, when we send it forward and backward in time. But to do that, first we need to be able to send stuff out, and get it back again."
    "There's no way," Jerboa said. "It's strictly a one-way trip."
    "We'll figure out a way," Lydia said. "Trial and error. We just need to open a second rift close enough to the first rift to bring our stuff back. Yeah? Once we're good enough, we send people. And eventually, we send people, along with enough equipment to build a telescope in deep space, so we can spy on Earth in the distant past or the far future."
    "There are so many steps in there, it's ridiculous," Jerboa said. "Every one of those steps might turn out to be just as impossible as the satellite thing turned out to be. We can't do this with just