It was the moment I’d worked for all my life, and somehow it was even better than I’d imagined it: they named the crew of the Mars mission, and I was the engineer. “Lauren Skye Singh,” they said, and my ears rang, I felt like I was going to pass out. I was glad they were putting the crew names on a projection so I could see mine up there with Peter O’Riley’s and Leslie Neumann’s, so that I had confirmation it was not my imagination but the real thing.
Everyone applauded, and the other engineers from my training group were clapping me on the back and congratulating me, so many of them that their words blurred together: good show, Lauren, well done, babes, knew you’d be the one. There was champagne — well, sparkling something, anyway — there was cake. I called my mother, everybody called everybody else’s mother, they had us pose for the first crew picture ever, which frankly looked demented and they had to take at least nine of them to get one good one. Because we were all dazed — we were going to Mars. Yes, it was what we’d been training for, but so had everyone else in our groups. We, us personally: we were going to Mars.
So when I got out in the corridor alone for a moment of fresh air and Betsy Donnelly from my training group was pointing a gun at me, it just seemed like one more moment detached from reality. Houston, we have a problem, the Texas kind of problem? I wanted to giggle, but the gun looked very, very real. “Betsy, what are you doing,” I said. The cooler air of the corridor suddenly felt very, very cold.
“I have time-travelled to change this timeline forty-three times,” she said. “Forty-three times, Lauren! It is supposed to be me on that crew list! Not you!”
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“Are you all right, Bets? Have you — do you need to sit down or —”
“Don’t patronize me!” she snapped.
Time travel wasn’t real. I worked for three different space agencies on a joint project. If anybody would know if time travel was real, it would be me. Wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t I? I squinted at the weird wires on Betsy’s belt and the determined look in her eye.
“You went off and invented time travel,” I said.
“It wasn’t easy. We were closer to it than you’d think,” she added reluctantly, “but it still wasn’t easy. But watching you go to Mars in my place — everyone I went to high school with knew your name. Your face was on all the screens at my grocery store and pharmacy. You on Mars. You. Not me. It was worth it.”
“You invented time travel,” I repeated. She didn’t seem to be getting it, and possibly I was not the most compelling conversationalist at that moment. “Don’t you think you could … be famous for that instead?”
“But I don’t want to be famous for time travelling, I want to go to Mars,” she said.
I thought about it for a moment and then a moment more, because I couldn’t think of a better way to put it that would be kind, gentle, wise. Eventually I had to go with my first impulse: “Too damn bad, Betsy.”
She looked like I’d slapped her. She looked like she was going to slap me.
“They don’t put nutters who shoot people on the Mars crew. I don’t know what you did for the other forty-two failures —” She flinched at the word failure, and the gun twitched; better not lean too hard on that “— but this isn’t going to succeed either. Because you cannot murder your way onto the Mars mission. Which you should have figured out, because you are, and I can’t believe I’m the one telling you this, smart enough to invent time travel.”
For the first time the point of the gun wavered. I saw a glimmer of hope. Betsy Donnelly might be able to jump back in time to try again to fix this, but I had just the one timeline, and up until five minutes ago, I had liked the way it was going.
“Look, Bets,” I said. “I get how you’re feeling, because if it had been you instead of me, I would be crushed too. I really would. But — you’ve tried forty-two times to change the outcome. Is it always me?”
I wanted the answer to be yes. I really wanted to be that big a shining star, the Mars engineer of destiny, my name in lights. But her face got red, and she muttered, “No.”
“No?”
“No,” she said louder. “Sometimes it’s Harry Wu. A couple times it was Eugene, OK? Mostly you or Harry. But it’s never been me. I figure one or two more jumps —”
“Or you could just … stick with this one. And become the inventor of time travel. I’ll be one of a crew. You’d be a lone genius. You saw how hard it was to get all of us with our eyes open at the same time in the crew picture, but you’d be the only one in your bespoke portraits, the swirls of time surrounding you. You can be great as you, Betsy, not as me.”
She finally lowered the gun all the way, and I breathed a sigh of relief, but the door cracked open behind me, and she was gone — around the corner, or on another time jump to try to trade her greatness for another she liked better, I never knew. I would have to wait to hear her name in the news — and hope that I remembered it accurately.
The story behind the story
Marissa Lingen reveals the inspiration behind Betsy Donnelly’s forty-third chance.
Time-travel stories are frequently unhinged.
I’ve written several myself, so this is not a slight on them. But the trope where a character circles back to the same moment over and over again, the deliberate Groundhog Day plot? That’s … not something a well person would do. Try something different. I thought of the title for this one but didn’t have a clear plot for why this person would not just … do something else. So I thought about my readers, as a group: what is it that science-fiction readers want so much that they would completely lose touch with sensible boundaries over it?
Well, going to space. Obviously.
Science-fiction nerds — and I include myself in this group — get more than a touch irrational about The Final Frontier. And once I knew that the title character was time travelling for space travel, the rest of the story more or less wrote itself.