The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF by Mike Ashley

Author:Mike Ashley [Ashley, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781472100269
Publisher: Robinson

WOMEN ON THE BRINK OF A CATACLYSM

Molly Brown

One of the hardest types of time-travel story to write is that involving a time loop, a kind of endless knot or Shrivatsa which has no beginning or end but, like the serpent Ouroboros, seems to be chasing or even consuming its own tail. The classic examples are “By His Bootstraps” (1941) and “All You Zombies . . .” (1959) by Robert A. Heinlein, both of which are too easily available to reprint here. Instead I wanted to use this lesser known but equally complex, and much more amusing, example.

Molly Brown is an American writer and occasional stand-up comedienne, long resident in Britain. Her novels have included the historical mystery Invitation to a Funeral (1995) and a children’s science-fiction thriller, Virus (1994), and you will find other time-travel stories in her collection Bad Timing (2001).

I felt like I was going through a meat grinder. Then there was a blinding flash of light – bright orange – and I felt like I was going through a meat grinder backwards. And there I was, back in one piece. Slightly dizzy, a little stiff around the joints. Swearing I’d never do that again.

The digital display inside the capsule read: 29 April 1995, 6:03 p.m., E.S.T. If that was true, then I was furious. Toni promised she would only set the timer forward by two minutes, and I’d gone forward by a year! A whole year, wasted. Didn’t she realize I had work to do? And then I thought: oh my God, the exhibition! I was supposed to have an exhibition in July, 1994 – if I’ve really gone forward a year, I missed my one-woman show at Gallery Alfredo!

I opened the capsule door, bent on murder. And then I froze. This wasn’t my studio.

I live and work on the top floor of an old warehouse in lower Manhattan, and I do sculpture. Abstract sculpture. I take scrapped auto parts and turn them into something beautiful. I twist industrial rubbish into exquisite shapes. I can mount a bicycle wheel onto a wooden platform and make it speak volumes about the meaning of life. I once placed a headless Barbie doll inside a fish tank and sold it for five thousand dollars, and that was before I was famous – I hear the same piece recently fetched more than forty.

I’d been working on a new piece called “Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm”: an arrangement of six black and white television sets, each showing a video loop of a woman scrubbing a floor, when Toni Fisher rang the doorbell. I’ve known Toni off and on since we were kids. We grew up in the same town and went to the same high school before going our separate ways after graduation, in 1966. I went to art school in California; she got a scholarship to study physics at Cambridge in England. It would be twenty years before we met again, at the launch party for Gutsy Ladies: Women making their mark in the 80s, the latest book by Arabella Winstein.

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