The River of No Return

disarray. The Ofan have taken advantage of the confusion and are gaining in power.”
    Nick whistled. “Did they cause this destruction?”
    “Second image.” A new picture replaced the specter of London. This time it was the Guild compound near Santiago, also entirely in ruins. “No,” Ahn said. “The Ofan didn’t cause it. Humankind has reached this state unaided.”
    “I suppose I’m not terribly surprised,” Nick said, and no one contradicted him.
    “Close image,” Ahn said, and the picture of the Santiago compound winked out. Ahn put the card case back in his pocket. “As perhaps you know, the Guild tries not to interfere with the vast movements of human history. The opposite, in fact. But the Ofan have their beautiful dreams.” Ahn steepled his fingers. “In my time, ecological devastation and a world war have made it impossible for the Guild to maintain its operations on a global scale. The Ofan find it easier to gain members among those few who are unfortunate enough to jump into our desolate world. Using their knowledge of the future, they are traveling back and trying to establish powerful cells in earlier eras. This era, and this city—Georgian London—is just such a stronghold. They are doing their best to dig in deep here and now, because they believe they can influence some things in the early nineteenth century that will pan out much later on. Their goal is to intervene in human history, keep the earth clean, and safe; to prevant that ecological devastation, that terrible war . . .”
    “And that’s wrong, why?”
    Ahn let his steepled fingers interlace. “It would be nice if we could go back and fix our mistakes,” he said carefully. “Apologize and try again. But that isn’t the way it works. This new horror, this turning back of time itself? It must be because the Ofan have meddled with the future. That is the only possible explanation. The Ofan have changed something, who knows what. It could be anything at all. And now the future, as terrible as it was, has turned on us, like a cornered tiger. That is worse, surely, than simply trying to survive the difficult times ahead.”
    Nick looked up at the bulbous chandelier glimmering with the light of hidden candles, then back at the Alderman of the future. “If you can’t jump past the Pale, how do you know it stays bad? What if it’s some sort of salvation? ‘The world’s great age begins anew, the golden years return, the earth doth like a snake renew’—that sort of thing.”
    “You would not think that if you saw what it is like. If you felt the pressure, the storm of time blowing toward us, catastrophe piling ruin upon ruin . . .”
    “My daughter,” Arkady said in a broken voice from across the table, as if he had not been listening to Ahn, “my Eréndira . . .”
    Ahn glanced at Arkady, then passed a hand over his face, clearly glad to be interrupted.
    “My Eréndira was in Brazil. She was part of a group that were trying to pierce the Pale, to learn what lies beyond it. The Ofan were reaching toward it, pushing, working together. I do not know exactly what happened, but they lost her. She alone had managed to jump beyond the Pale, and then—she could not return. They could sense her trying, trying . . . and then they lost even that faint image of her.” Arkady looked at Nick, and his blue eyes were like two empty holes right through his head, with the sky shining through.
    “I’m sorry,” Nick said.
    Arkady didn’t reply. He wasn’t listening to Nick. Indeed, he wasn’t really even in the same room. “They simply lost her,” he said again, and his voice quavered like an old man’s. “Then I got a call one day when I was at the Santiago compound. She had reappeared. Not in Brazil but here, in London, in 1793. She was dying. I flew to London. I jumped back. I found her with the Ofan, in a house in Chelsea. They were the followers of that coward Ignatz Vogelstein!” He spat the name. “It was the Ofan who were with her, those riffraff! Not her own papa! But I got there, in time to kiss her, in time to say good-bye.”
    Alice put her hand on her husband’s shoulder but he shrugged it off.
    “She could not speak. I could only hold her. She died. Her beautiful hair, it had turned white, like mine. Her face was young but her hair was white, and her eyes! Despair like that? I have never seen it. And in the eyes of my own child . . .” He wept, his face uplifted for all to see the tears.