The River of No Return

toasted as if to a dead friend: “To Alva.”
    Penture put his glass down but remained standing. He leaned over the table and waited until he had everyone’s attention. “Now,” he said, “I’m afraid we must tell Mr. Davenant about the future.”
    It was as if a cold wind had blown through the room. People shifted in their chairs, and Nick watched as Alice transformed from a relaxed friend among friends to a tightly controlled Alderwoman among colleagues.
    He glanced back at Penture and found that those flat green eyes were bent on him. “What do you know about the future, Davenant?”
    Waterloo? The scramble for Africa? Hoover Dam? The Cultural Revolution? The Beatles? AIDS? “A great deal,” he said. “Mostly useless.”
    “No. Not what’s coming. What is. What does the future mean to the Guild? What does the Guild mean to the future?”
    “The Guild protects the future from the past,” Nick said. “You protect the flow of history from the Ofan, who think it is possible to change the river, and change the future.”
    “That is the theory. If history is a river that flows to the sea, the Guild is the guardian of that flow. But recently . . .”
    The Alderman paused and looked down at his hands, which rested on the table. He wore a heavy golden ring with a polished purple stone. It looked very old, almost crude. Nick twisted his own ring on his finger. Arkady had his hand around the stem of his glass, and that enormous ruby winked in the dim light. And Alice’s pale yellow stone; Nick couldn’t see it, for her hands were in her lap, but she wore it always. Ahn’s hands were on the table; he wore what looked like a plain gold wedding band on his ring finger. And Saatçi? Marjory Northway? Their hands were out of sight.
    Penture covered the fingers of his left hand with his right, obscuring his ring. “The Guild has always protected the river of history, Davenant, since time immemorial.”
    “Can time be immemorial for the Guild? Surely you know everything, back to when we were hunting wooly rhinos in the Dordogne.”
    “Have you ever met a caveman?”
    “Yes.” Nick pointed to Arkady. “There he sits.”
    Arkady nodded, accepting this as an accolade.
    Penture smiled thinly. “I mean a real caveman. I know the answer; you have not. Any single person’s window of travel is about a thousand years back, give or take a century or two. If you were to jump back to the Norman Conquest, you might meet someone from the age of Chirst, so we can talk to people from the past across a gap of roughly two thousand years.”
    “And what is the window for jumping forward?”
    Penture said nothing. The silence around the table was complete.
    “My greeter jumped forward from Charlemagne’s empire. Ricchar Hartmut,” Nick continued.
    “Yes, we still get people from a thousand years ago who jump to the twenty-first century,” Alice said. “Like Ricchar. But after the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century, the traveling begins to get very difficult. People make shorter jumps. People who jump from the twenty-first century . . .” She shook her head. “It gets harder and harder to jump forward, Nick. We don’t know why. Usually people make an initial jump like you or me. Several hundred years. Well beyond their natural life spans. But recently, people who jump from their natural time in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries can only make a small leap. A few decades at most. It’s very awkward; their spouses and children might still be alive. And for those of us who know how to travel in time, jumping past the twenty-first century is almost impossible. It takes incredible energy and concentration, and we have to find very specific places where we can latch on to a current that will carry us there. It’s as if there isn’t any feeling further on downriver that we can recognize. It’s as if the entire future is becoming a scar.”
    “And this is new? You used to be able to go to the future more easily?”
    “No, not exactly,” Marjory said. “It was always harder to jump after the twentieth century. Like the Alderwoman said, it’s scarred up in the future. Once you’re there it isn’t all that pleasant. Things are rough further along. Very rough. But we used to be able to go there. And some people were still making their initial jumps there, poor things.”
    Nick watched as Alice reached her hand out to Arkady, beside her. He took her hand and stroked it. “What’s