Chapter 23: Going Backward, Part Three
“Nagasaki,” declared Meridiem with finality. “Bigger bomb, more victims to save.”
“To deliver our message to,” Gnosi corrected.
“Same thing,” insisted Meridiem. “After seeing all of those lemmings, I’m not going to let another living thing die to these nuclear horrors than I have to.”
“Well I have no opinion one way or the other,” said Gnosi. “What do you think, Professor?”
Gus was staring absently into the interior of the Sun. “Hmm?” he said finally. “I suppose Nagasaki is as good as any other.”
There was one other bombing site he could have suggested, the one he had witnessed in person. There was even a person there, ready to be rescued.
But what if Crystal didn’t want to be rescued? There was no other reason for her to have deliberately gone into that shack but suicide, regardless of the reasons he had spun for reporters and for Father Delver. And what other reason would she have killed herself, but because of him? He had known in some dim corner of his mind that she had a crush on him, but all he could think about at the time was his precious Arline, dying slowly of tuberculosis in her hospital bed in Albuquerque. If he had said something to Crystal, if he had let her down gently or introduced her to one of the single chemistry assistants, maybe she would have lived. Maybe she would have been the Celestia that had greeted him at the station in Canterlot instead of her petty, self-absorbed reincarnation.
To go back to Trinity would have meant starting and re-stopping time in order to convince her to live. It would have meant trying to manipulate her love for him in order to get her to relay their message down through four decades. If he didn’t do it, that would be the end for humanity. And Gus didn’t think he had it in him to do it. Of all the bold-faced lies he had told to get a woman to do what he wanted, this would have been both the noblest in purpose and the foulest in his heart. Because he would have to betray Arline to do it.
And he just couldn’t. Even with 4.85 billion souls on the line, he couldn’t do it.
11:01 am on August 9, 1945. Nagasaki, Japan.
They were directly beneath an exploding bomb again. This one was a pea compared the building-sized monstrosity that was Tsar Bomba.
Gus looked down at his feet, which were crunching in sand. They were in a playground, adjacent to a school. Looking up, he saw several empty swings frozen in various positions, put there by a capricious breeze. Behind the swings was a long low building. The windows of the building were adorned with flowers and birds made from origami.
Turning his head, Gus saw mounds of freshly-dug earth, next to a crude hole in the ground. It was a shelter, there to protect civilians against American bombing raids. It was obvious that the shelter was not dug anywhere deep enough to protect against this bomb.
In another direction, Gus could see children frozen in place, laughing and running after dragonflies with little jars in their hands. The teachers that should be supervising them were instead digging a second shelter—apparently the first one wasn’t big enough to save everyone.
“That one,” Meridiem announced, pointing towards the swings.
Gus saw a girl that he missed between the swings, younger than the rest. Her face was frozen in an expression of near-hysterical glee. She was flat on her stomach in the sand, with a spray going up into her face. Clutched triumphantly in her hands was a bottle containing a caught dragonfly. As he watched, Meridiem and Gnosi walked over, picked up the human statue, and begin walking down a street, away from the bomb.
“Come along, Professor,” Meridiem called over her shoulder. “We want to be at the very limit of my range before we try talking to her.”
Gus looked around him, taking in the happy children and worried adults, none of whom had any idea what was about to happen to them. With a deep sigh, he started trudging down the road after the two Markists.
& & &
Nagasaki seemed like a city out of another time. There were no cars to be seen, only horse-drawn carriages and people on bicycles, going about their day without a care in the world. Factories could be seen towards the outskirts, but frozen in time; you could almost ignore the smoke they produced. Those factories were the reason the city was a target, as they supplied a significant portion of Imperial Japan’s navy. The trio with their kidnapped child crossed a pair of railroad tracks, with the locomotive frozen as it was just about to make the crossing.
It was on an old bridge crossing a curving river that Meridiem finally reached her limit. “Alright,” she said, panting a little. “Everyone link hands.” The Japanese girl was propped so she was standing instead of lying down. Meridiem grabbed onto one of her hands while supporting her back, and Gnosi did the same from her other side. Gus then linked arms with the two after carefully planting his umbrella on the ground in front of him.
For a brief instant, the sky flashed from red to blue and back again. The pea of blinding light expanded to the size of a lemon before freezing once again.
For a moment, it seemed that the girl was still frozen. Then her eyes flitted about her, taking in the sudden change in scenery and the strange people who were holding on to her. The glass jar dropped out of her hands, forgotten, as she took in a breath to scream.
Gnosi and Meridiem released the girl in tandem, and she turned to run away. At that moment, the skink in Meridiem’s pocket darted out and made its escape by running down the length of the umbrella. Meridiem tried to catch it, but grabbed the umbrella a split-second too late. The skink then found a crack between the sidewalk and the edge of the stone bridge, and wedged itself inside.
The girl stopped and turned her head, her expression softening from fear to curiosity. Her attention was fixed on the umbrella.
Noticing this, Meridiem slowly picked up the object and then held it out towards the girl. “Do you want this?” she asked in a gentle voice. “Don’t worry; we’re here to save you. We need you to deliver a message.”
The girl’s eyes were still riveted on the umbrella, now in her possession. Her mouth opened into a little “o” for a few moments, and then she humbly hugged it tight and smiled shyly.
“Does she even know English?” Gnosi asked.
“Success!” cried Meridiem, beckoning for Gnosi to hand her a magazine and letter.
“Is it, though?” Gnosi asked, suddenly lowering himself to his knees. He slapped his hands roughly together a few times. “I can’t feel my hands.”
Meridiem looked down. “Neither can I,” she said with a shrug. “But we changed history—we must have.”
“Do you feel a pull back to 1985?” Gus asked doubtfully.
“Well no, but maybe it takes a while to kick in.”
“And maybe the chances of a little girl holding onto a few pieces of paper in a language she can’t read are too low to be worth considering.”
“Then we rescue somebody else,” Meridiem insisted. “An adult.”
“Who would look at us and see only the enemy,” Gus said wearily.
“Then we keep trying. We move every single inhabitant of Nagasaki to safety, if that’s what it takes.”
“And what if that isn’t enough?” Gus insisted. “What if we drop dead on the third or fourth try?”
“She’s going to keep the umbrella,” said Gnosi in alarm. And indeed, the girl was slowly wandering away, umbrella still hugged to her bosom, looking around her and trying to figure out where she was.
“I’ll find another cane,” Gus said.
“No you don’t get it,” said Gnosi, standing up and pointing at the girl. “She’s going to keep that umbrella her entire life before growing up to become the veiled woman who gave it back to you at Heathrow in 1985. And then we’re going to give it back to her in 1945 so she can give it back to you, over and over and over again.” He ran over and roughly snatched the umbrella away from the girl, causing her to fall down on her rear and start bawling.
“Gnosi!” Meridiem exclaimed. “How could you do something so cruel?”
He held the umbrella up to them. “Don’t you see? This umbrella isn’t cheap; it’s hundreds of years old. It’s proof positive that we’re in a time loop! We’ve been trying to save the world this way dozens of times, and failing every single time.”
“Are you turning your back on Kindness?” Meridiem demanded.
“Yes, when it’s just cruelty in disguise. We’re taking her away from her friends, away from her family, from everyone she’s ever known. She will be scarred, not only physically but mentally, over not only what the bomb did to her, but also us, who rescue her only to drop dead immediately afterwards. What kind of life is that? Especially since we’ll still fail to save the human race?”
“But what other choice do we have?” Meridiem begged. “Do you think Hiroshima is going to be any different? Who else do we have?”
“We have one more,” Gus said, towering over the two bickering students. He snatched the umbrella roughly from Gnosi. “Get out that instant camera and get ready to take a picture.” He hobbled over to the crying girl, using the wall of the bridge to support himself. He then kneeled and presented the object to her laid across his arms. “Will you accept this sword of a noble samurai warrior?” he asked, being sure to emphasize the Japanese word with what was as close to the correct pronunciation as possible.
The girl dried her tears on the edge of her school uniform. “Samurai?” she asked, tilting her head sideways. Then she snatched up the object with a happy cry and started swinging it in the air a few times, before running up and giving Gus a quick hug—a hug captured on film by Gnosi.
Gnosi and Meridiem joined Gus so he could examine the picture. The girl and elderly man on the bridge were perfectly framed, with the impossible image of an atomic bomb caught in mid-explosion hovering over their heads.
The girl, seeing the picture, stretched out her hands for the camera.
“Greedy little thing, isn’t she?” Gnosi observed with a smile. He handed her the Polaroid SLR 680 instant camera, and watched as she turned it around every possible way. “I bet she’s going to break it.”
That was when she found the shutter button. She took a couple pictures of their feet before finally getting it pointed the right way and getting a photo of Gus flanked by Meridiem and Gnosi. Handing the camera back to Gnosi, she picked up the initially gray photo and yelled at it, then began jumping up and down in excitement as it began to self-develop.
While she was doing this, Gus dug a felt-tip pen out of Gnosi’s backpack. “Could you get me her name?” he asked.
“Kimiko Mineko,” said Gnosi. “I got it off of a boarding pass she dropped at the airport.”
The girl briefly looked up at them in recognition on hearing her name.
Gus wrote the name at the bottom of the photo depicting her and him, before putting it in the backpack. He held out his hand towards the girl, moving the pen with his other hand in a writing motion.
Kimiko looked warily between her picture and the old man, before reluctantly surrendering it.
Gus turned the photo over then wrote something on the back. He blew on the writing for a few seconds to make sure it was dry then gave the photo back to her.
Kimiko glanced at the writing for a moment before tucking the photo into the vest of her school uniform.
Gus tossed the pen back into Gnosi’s backpack, then reached out and grabbed the hands of both Markists. “Now I need you to put her back in the timestream—start and stop time again.”
Meridiem looked at him with uncertainty. “It will be another radiation hit.”
“Just do it.”
With a shrug, Meridiem obeyed.
The trio fell to the ground. The explosion was now the size of half the sky. The area under the blast was hard to see, obscured by heat waves.
“Do…either of you have…strength enough to move?” Gus asked.
Meridiem wearily raised her hand.
“Then get the girl under the bridge. There’s a small chance that she might drown, but at least this time she won’t suffer as much from radiation poisoning as she would if we just left her exposed.”
“What are you going to do with that picture you kept?” Gnosi asked while Meridiem carried out her instructions.
“We’re taking her family away from her, so it’s only just that I do what I can to get her a new family who loves her.”
After Meridiem had returned, he instructed her and Gnosi to hold hands with him. “We only have one more destination left to us. I’m…going to need you to do all the talking.”