The River of No Return

functioning much like a ha-ha. Standing now at the edge of the pool, which was also the edge of the hill, Nick looked down into a broad, green valley that stretched for a mile until it reached the uncompromising cliff face of the nearest mountain. A series of curving glass and wooden buildings, stark to his eye, but strangely beautiful, stood among tall trees. Nick let his gaze climb the mountains, then descend. He took a deep breath and pulled his loose cotton shirt over his head. He would inaugurate his new life with a swim.
    In the months that followed, Nick’s depression began slowly to lift. There were thirty others like him at the compound, all at different stages of their year of initiation. In addition to the students, a good fifty Guild members lived there full-time, serving as instructors, doctors, guides, cooks, gardeners, architects, researchers. Some practiced new professions that Nick had never heard of. Psychologists, personal trainers, computer techs, masseurs, yogis, ski instructors. The curving structures he had noticed on his first day were parliament buildings of sorts, and Guild officials were always coming and going, including Alice Gacoki, the Alderwoman herself, whom Nick had met for the first time during his third week in Chile.
    The architect had included a spa and a vacation resort in his design, with ski slopes in the mountains, extensive bridle paths, and even an amusement park. Families—Guild members who had met and married in their shared futures—could come for a week or a month of relaxation. Their children, born into this time, could not be told the truth about their parents’ origins. Nick was the sort of man whom children liked. Perhaps because he treated them like he did everyone else: politely, even distantly. Until suddenly the little ones were climbing all over him and asking him what happened to his eyebrow and would he please be a Tyrannosaurus rex ? He liked being a Tyrannosaurus rex, a beast that astounded and fascinated him as much as it did the children. But he didn’t like lying to his small friends. So he learned to avoid the resort area of the compound.
    Nick was expected to change himself from what he had been into what he had to become, and the lessons were administered constantly. First, he learned the Rules of the Guild. He had to recite them, with the rest of the students, every day before classes began. There were only four:
There Is No Return.
There Is No Return.
Tell No One.
Uphold the Rules.
    The first two rules sounded the same but one was for time and one was for space—though the more he thought about it the more Nick felt that he couldn’t tell time and space apart.
    “Uphold the Rules.” The last rule struck Nick as ridiculous; the Guild made following the rules supremely comfortable. Each and every member received two million British pounds a year, every year. Nick’s first two million was already waiting in an account set up in his new name when he woke that first evening in the compound. A man calling himself a “financial adviser” had told him all about it on his second day. The money, he said, was a token. An annual gift from the Guild to its members. “No strings attached,” whatever that meant.
    Language was the huge hurdle for most new Guild members. Three were required. First, twenty-first-century English, which Nick already spoke, after a fashion. Second, the language of the country to which they were reassigned—but Nick got a pass on that one, too, since he’d been assigned to the United States. The third required language was medieval Finnish, the official language of the Guild bureaucracy. Nick hated Finnish. After months of instruction the only phrase he had mastered was “ Mÿnna tachton gernast spuho somen gelen Emÿna daÿda ”: “I willingly want to speak Finnish, but I can’t.” This got a laugh—the first time he said it. But Nick could survive Finnish: There were only two classes a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays after dinner. Apart from this, his time was more or less his own.
    There was another lucky English-speaker in the group, who had arrived only a fortnight before Nick. She was a sixty-five-year-old Irishwoman named Meg O’Reilly, assigned to Australia. One day in County Mayo in 1848 she had found an apple sitting in the road, red and unblemished: a miracle. She had picked it up and was turning it around, trying to decide where to take her first, ecstatic bite when two starving women attacked her with