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

sobered up. Lydia took one look at her, one whiff of the booze fumes, and had to go outside and dry heave. She sat, bent double, on Madame Alberta's tiny lawn, almost within view of the St. Ignatius College science lab that they'd stolen all that gear from a few months earlier. From inside the house, she heard Malik and Jerboa trying to explain to Madame Alberta that they had figured out what happened to the coin. And how they could turn it into kind of a good thing.
    They were having a hard time getting through to her. Madame Alberta's fauxropean accent was basically gone, and she sounded like a bitter old drunk lady from New Jersey who just wanted to drink herself to death.
    Eventually, Malik came out and put one big hand gently on Lydia's shoulder. "You should go home," he said. "Jerboa and I will help her sober up, and then we'll talk her through this. I promise we won't make any decisions until you're there to take part."
    Lydia nodded and got in her rusty old Ford, which rattled and groaned and finally came to a semblance of life long enough to let her roll back down the highway to her crappy apartment. Good thing it was pretty much downhill all the way.
    When Madame Alberta first visited the Time Travel Club, nobody quite knew what to make of her. She had olive skin, black hair, and a black beauty mark on the left side of her face, which tended to change its location every time Lydia saw her. And she wore a dark headscarf, or maybe a snood, and a long black dress with a slit up one side.
    That first meeting, her Eurasian accent was the thickest and fakest it would ever be: "I have the working theory of the time machine. And the prototype that is, how you say, half-built. I need a few more pairs of hands to help me complete the assembly, but also I require the ethical advice."
    "Like a steering committee," said Jerboa, perking up with a quick sideways head motion.
    "Even so," said Madame Alberta. "Much like the Unitarian Church upstairs, the time machine has need of a steering committee."
    At first, everybody assumed Madame Alberta was just sharing her own time-travel fantasy—albeit one that was a lot more elaborate, and involved a lot more delayed gratification, than everybody else's. Still, the rest of the meeting was sort of muted. Lydia was all set to share her latest experiences with solar-sail demolition derby, the most dangerous sport that would ever exist. And Malik was having drama with the Babylonians, either in the past or the future, Lydia wasn't sure which. But Madame Alberta had a quiet certainty that threw the group out of whack.
    "I leave you now," said Madame Alberta, bowing and curtseying in a single weird arm-sweeping motion that made her appear to be the master of a particularly esoteric drunken martial arts style. "Take the next week to discuss my proposition. Be aware, though: This will be the most challenging of ventures." She whooshed out of the room, long flowy dress trailing behind her.
    Nobody actually spent the week between meetings debating whether they wanted to help Madame Alberta build her time machine—instead, Lydia kept asking the other members whether they could find an excuse to kick her out of the group. "She freaks me out, man," Lydia said on the phone to Malik on Sunday evening. "She seems for real mentally not there."
    "I don't know," Malik said. "I mean, we've never kicked anybody out before. There was that one guy who seemed like he had a pretty serious drug problem last year, with his whole astral projection shtick. But he stopped coming on his own, after a couple times."
    "I just don't like it," said Lydia. "I have a terrible feeling she's going to ruin everything." She didn't add that she really needed this group to continue the way it was, that these people were becoming her only friends, and the only reason she felt like the future might actually really exist for her. She didn't want to get needy or anything.
    "Eh," said Malik. "It's a time travel club. If she becomes a